Sim-and-Human Co-training for Data-Efficient and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation
This work addresses the challenge of costly robot data collection for robotic manipulation, offering a novel co-training approach that is incremental in leveraging existing data sources.
The paper tackles the problem of data-efficient and generalizable robotic manipulation by combining synthetic simulation data and real-world human data to overcome their respective gaps, achieving up to 40% improvement over baselines and 62.5% out-of-distribution success with only 80 real data points.
Synthetic simulation data and real-world human data provide scalable alternatives to circumvent the prohibitive costs of robot data collection. However, these sources suffer from the sim-to-real visual gap and the human-to-robot embodiment gap, respectively, which limits the policy's generalization to real-world scenarios. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation offers the robot action that human data lacks, while human data provides the real-world observation that simulation struggles to render. Motivated by this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training framework to simultaneously extract kinematic prior from simulated robot actions and visual prior from real-world human observations. Based on the two complementary priors, we achieve data-efficient and generalizable robotic manipulation in real-world tasks. Empirically, SimHum outperforms the baseline by up to $\mathbf{40\%}$ under the same data collection budget, and achieves a $\mathbf{62.5\%}$ OOD success with only 80 real data, outperforming the real only baseline by $7.1\times$. Videos and additional information can be found at \href{https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human}{project website}.