Topic

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

Simulators, domain randomisation, and the evaluation harnesses that decide whether a policy really works.

70papers in 2026-07

6%of all cs.RO that month

+1.59ppshare change, last 6 vs prior 12 months

24-month volume

arXiv query: cat:cs.RO AND (abs:"sim-to-real" OR abs:"simulation benchmark" OR abs:"domain randomization")

Presented at reading clubs

These already have a slide kit, so they are the fastest ones to pick up and present.

2026-06-29

VLK: Learning Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Synthetic Interactions in Reconstructed Scenes

Yen-Jen Wang, Jiaman Li, Sirui Chen +9

clubHumanoids & locomotion Egocentric & human data

2025-07-16

EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videos

Ruihan Yang, Qinxi Yu, Yecheng Wu +12 · 131 citations

clubVision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

2025-05-24

ManiFeel: Benchmarking and Understanding Visuotactile Manipulation Policy Learning

Quan Khanh Luu, Pokuang Zhou, Zhengtong Xu +3 · 21 citations

clubTactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2022-06-28

DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

Philipp Wu, Alejandro Escontrela, Danijar Hafner +2 · 553 citations

clubCoRLWorld models Humanoids & locomotion

Recent work

2026-08-27

Riemann-1.0: An Embodied World Action Model for Physical AI

Haofeng Sun, Jiangbo Pei, Fei Kang +13

Egocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-27

4DSynth: Controllable Procedural World Synthesis for Dynamic Embodied Simulation

Zehao Qi, Haochen Luo, Jia-Wang Bian +2

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-27

Beyond Shallow-Water Photorealism: Physically and Sensor-Grounded Simulation for Deep-Sea Robotics

Michele Grimaldi, Enrico Di Maria, Ignacio Carlucho +1

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-27

Rapid On-Robot Learning for Dynamic Manipulation Skills: Robot Juggling

Taeyoon Lee, Chunpeng Wang, Christopher G. Atkeson +2

Dexterous manipulation Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-27

PredVLA: A Sub-Million-Parameter Predictive-Coding Policy for Robot Manipulation

Hiroki Sawada, Shunichi Kasahara

Vision-language-action Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-27

TrapVLA: Trapping Vision-Language-Action Models in Configured Failure Modes

Jun-Hui Liu, Kun-Yu Lin, Yi-Lin Wei +9

Vision-language-action Dexterous manipulation

2026-08-27

RTNav: Towards Real-Time Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Easop Lee, Lingyu Zhang, Boyuan Chen

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-26

PRISM: Projection-Integrated Sampling-Based MPC with Bayesian Cost Tuning for Bimanual Manipulation

Alinjar Dan, Iryna Hurova, Karl Kruusamäe +1

World models Tactile & force sensing

2026-08-26

Advantage-Driven Explicit Memory for Social Navigation

Yeonsoo Park, Mattia Racca, Guillaume Bono +4

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-25

Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning

Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu +7

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-25

CARO: Contact-Agnostic Residual Observation for Zero-Shot Robust Quadruped Locomotion

Zihan Yang, Shixuan Han, Kexin Guo +1

Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-25

NVIDIA Cosmos-H-Dreams: Real-Time Generative Physics Simulation for Surgical Robotics

Javier Gamazo Tejero, Lukas Zbinden, Keyur Sheth +7

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-25

SIREN-Bench: Behavior-Driven Generation and Evaluation of Emergency-Vehicle Interactions

Yicheng Zhu, Tianmu Zhao, Haoxin Leng +3

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Data collection & teleoperation

2026-08-25

Dynamical System-Based Imitation Learning and Neuroadaptive Control for Trajectory Recovery in Autonomous Ships

Yeyson A. Becerra-Mora, José Ángel Acosta

Egocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-24

Macro-Action Topological Navigation under Noisy Localization using Reinforcement Learning

Simon Hakenes, Tobias Glasmachers

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-24

RoboRacer Arena: Scaling High-Fidelity Autonomous Racing in Isaac Sim

Mihaela-Larisa Clement, Agnes Poks, Ezio Bartocci

ICRA 2027Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks 3D & spatial reasoning

2026-08-24

RACO: Reliability-Aware Coarse-Goal Optimization for Inspection-Oriented UAV Vision-Language Navigation

Sen Wang, Yiming Sun, Jiaxuan He +1

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-23

Enhancing Sim2Real Transfer for Torque-Controlled Robots through Real2Sim Dynamics Estimation and Reinforcement Learning

Davide Bargellini, Alex Pasquali, Andrea Govoni +2

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-23

EMPIRE: Explicit Manipulation Planning as a Learnable Intermediate Representation for Egocentric Hand-Motion Forecasting

Wen Wang, Ruibing Hou, Hong Chang +2

Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2026-08-23

Beyond Instance Slots: Semantically Rich World Models for Physical Interaction Planning

Juntao Cheng, Jingkai Wang, Yijun Shen +2

World models Dexterous manipulation

2026-08-23

DreamMimic: Learning Visuomotor Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via World Model

Jie Yin, Xingyu Lai

World models Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-23

BehaviorWorldGen: Closing the Loop between Action Models and World Simulators via Controllable Behavior-Aware Structured World Generation

Jiaqi Wang, Zhuo Zhang, Haining Guan +15

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-22

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation in Construction via Zero-Shot Learning: A Diffusion Policy-Guided Adaptive Control

Roman Ibrahimov, Salma Mozaffari, Arash Adel

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-22

DELTA: Deformable Elevation-Based Local Terrain Attention Encoder for Sparse-Terrain Quadrupedal Locomotion

Sanghyun Park, Moonkyu Jung, Jemin Hwangbo

ICRA 2027Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-22

Vision Guided Target Conditioned Control for Autonomous Excavation

Shuai Zhao, Ji-An Pan, Junwei Li +5

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-21

Betting for Sim-to-Real Performance Certificates

Yujia Chen, Bowen Weng

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Safety & evaluation

2026-08-21

NeSAM: Neuro-Symbolic Kinodynamics with Soil Adaptation for Off-Road Mobility

Chenhui Pan, Tong Xu, Francesco Cancelliere +1

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

2026-08-21

VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation

Congsheng Xu, Qiaochu Yang, Fangyuan Shi +7

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-21

Neural-Primitive: An Efficient End-to-end Local Planner with Primitive-based Imitation Learning for Autonomous Flight

Zhitao Liu, Guangtong Xu, Zihan Wang +3

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-20

Video2DoorTraversal: Push Door Traversal via Simulated Door Twins

Xincheng Tang, Yiji Chen, Youhan Xie +8

Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-20

Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms

Yanchen Guan, Xingcheng Liu, Bin Rao +7

World models Vision-language-action

2026-08-20

Towards Professional Tennis Styles for Humanoid Robots with Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking

Tao Huang, Ruofei Liu, Xuchen Tang +15

Humanoids & locomotion Egocentric & human data

2026-08-20

MILD: Tractable Terrain Modeling for Learning Improved Bipedal Locomotion on Deformable Surfaces

Zeren Luo, Jiahui Zhang, Zhe Xu +6 · 1 citation

RA-LHumanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-20

LF-GICP: Parameter-Free Degeneracy-Aware LiDAR Odometry via a Voxel-Normal Localizability Field

Eunsoo Im

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-19

Fine-Tuning VLAs with Self-Demonstrated Generative Control for Multi-Task Manipulation

Prachi Garg, Steve Xing, Prahit Yaugand +2

Vision-language-action Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-19

SCAPE: Scenario-Conditioned Simulation-Augmented Policy Evaluation

Dijie Zhu, Seunghun Oh, Ruopeng Huang +3

Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-19

Learning the Right Abstraction: Neural Reduced Dynamics for Complex Robot Control

Harry Zhang, Dan Negrut

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-19

ADEPT: Accelerating Dexterity via Pre-Training and Post-Training using Reinforcement Learning

Jayjun Lee, Jessica Yin, Asif Rana +7

Dexterous manipulation Tactile & force sensing

2026-08-19

LabDex: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Dexterous Manipulation in Laboratories

Zhipeng Tang, Sihang Chen, Sha Zhang +11

Dexterous manipulation Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-18

GuideFetch: A Task Coordination Framework for Concurrent Navigation and Object Retrieval in Assistive Robot Dogs

Qian Yin, Ruiping Liu, Kunyu Peng +7

ECCV 2026Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Navigation & mobility

317 papers in this corpus carry the simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks tag. How tagging works.