Topic 07 of 17

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks in robotics

Sim-to-real is the practice of training robot policies in simulation and transferring them to physical hardware, together with the benchmarks that measure whether a policy really works. Simulation is cheap, parallel and safe; the price is the reality gap, attacked with domain randomization, better physics, and photorealistic rendering.

69papers in 2026-07

5.9%of all cs.RO that month

+1.58ppshare 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

club pickHumanoids & 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

club pickVision-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

club pickTactile & 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

club pickCoRLWorld models Humanoids & locomotion

Recent work

2026-09-09

Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following

Boning Feng, Haoran Zhang, Xiaowen Bi +2

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

2026-09-09

Assembling Two Parts in One Hand

Liuao Pei, Tianyue Wu, Hui Zhang +2

CoRL 2026Dexterous manipulation Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-09

Time-Frequency Geometric Cross-Attention for Chunked Vision-Language-Action Models

Shengye Dong, Haochen Niu, Hao Liu +3

Vision-language-action Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-09

ViBe: Visual Behavior Adaptation for Perceptive Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Lokesh Krishna, Sarvesh Venkatesan, An Zhang +1

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

2026-09-09

MuJoCable: Reduced-Order Surface-Routed Cable Transmission for Tendon-Driven Robots

Yi Zhang, Qi Shao, Yicong Lin +3

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Hardware & morphology co-design

2026-09-09

Compact Visuotactile World Models for Lifting: Prediction, Reward Alignment, and Force Constraints

Qinzhen Ma, Sida Peng

World models Tactile & force sensing

2026-09-08

FRAME: Factored Retrieval via Attribute Readouts for Object-Centric Scene Memory

Woosang Jeon, Sanghyeok Choi, Minwoo Kim +2

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

2026-09-08

Ostrich: Taking Large Strides Through Stiff Contact in Differentiable Dynamics

Aleš Kučera, Karel Zimmermann

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-08

A Controlled Comparison of Manual and Teleoperated Intraocular Instrument Motion for an Input Device

Korab Hoxha, Mirza Imamovic, Angelo Henriques +1

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

2026-09-08

RoboCousin: Build Your Own Simulation Playground for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Jingxuan Zhu, Jingyi Li, LiangLiang Chen +3

Dexterous manipulation Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-08

CALIPER: Clean Scenes Cannot Rank Physical Inference in Pretrained Visual Representations

Aman Mehta, Riya Baviskar

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-08

Bridging Language and Physics: Automated Design of Continuum Robots with Large Language Models

Jingyi Chen, Mohan Zhang, Laura Yao +5

RoboticsDexterous manipulation Humanoids & locomotion

2026-09-07

Dex-X: Learning Visual-Tactile Dexterous Manipulation From Human Videos with Simulated Interaction

Ruoqu Chen, Feixiang Ruan, Liu Cao +9 · 1 citation

Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2026-09-07

Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly via Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining

Yuhan Wang, Yurou Chen, Hongye Jiang +1

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

2026-09-07

PhysReal: Learning Real-World Deformable Object Physics via Hybrid Constitutive Modeling

Yinan Deng, Jianqiao Song, Yisi Zhang +3

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

SMaRT-Tug: Structured Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Physics-Based Tugboat-Barge Collaborative Manipulation

Junkai Lu, Jiadong Zhao, Jiacheng Zhang +8

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

2026-09-07

OpenWAM: An Open, Modular Exploration Towards Systematic World-Action Model Pretraining

Yuran Wang, Siqiao Huang, Mingleyang Li +21

Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2026-09-07

MEMOBench: A Process Level Memory Benchmark for Robotic Manipulation

Haiyang Sun, Haoxiao Wang, Junming Chen +6

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

2026-09-07

WM-Craftnet: World Synesthesia Model for Generalizable and Robust Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

Jie Yin, Zeyuan Zhao, Xiaojing Tan +3

World models Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-07

Mind the Phase: Effective Rank and Representation Health in Legged Locomotion

Felipe Tommaselli, Thiago H. Segreto, Juliano D. Negri +2

CoRL 2026Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-06

SkillX: Unified Multi-Skill Policy Learning for Humanoid Soccer

Zhangchen Ye, Enxuan Ruan, Yifei Bao +10

CoRL 2026Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-06

VLA-Corrector: Stage-Aware Observable State Understanding for Prompt-Based Closed-Loop Recovery of Vision-Language-Action Policies

Chang Song, Bin Qian, Yan Feng +1

Vision-language-action Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-05

IM-ENGINE: Image Editing for Embodied Data Generation

Yian Wang, Junyi Cao, Xiaowen Qiu +1

Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2026-09-05

Where Success Breaks: Failure-Boundary Learning for Robust Vision-Language-Action Models

Yanzhe Chen, Zhijun Cao, Mike Zheng Shou

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

2026-09-05

SCoCaT: Success Conditioned Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Docking

Aman Arora, Ricard Marsal I Castan, Matteo El-Hariry +1

CoRL 2026Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-05

FALCON-S: Fixed-wing ground-effect Aerodynamics Simulator and Flight Control Learning Suite

Matteo El Hariry, Pedro Lima, Andrej Orsula +2

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

2026-09-05

Closed-Loop Evaluation of Bird's-Eye-View Maps from Cross-View Transformers as Inputs to Behavior-Cloning Policies

Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto

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

2026-09-04

Time-Aware Assistive Navigation

Masaki Kuribayashi, Zhongkai Shangguan, Eshed Ohn-Bar

ICRA 2026Egocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-04

NavArena: Automated Construction of Goal-Oriented Navigation Benchmarks from 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstructions

Junhui Wang, Wei Yang, Xinyao Li +4

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

2026-09-03

A Low-Cost, Open Platform for End-to-End Autonomous Driving on a Miniature Ackermann Vehicle

Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperer

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

2026-09-03

Continuous Actions from Discrete Minds: Latent-Aligned Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Ruoyu Yao, Yusen Xie, Qingzhao Liu +5

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

2026-09-03

Catalogue Photography as a Cold Start: Toward Deployable Carbide Burr Recognition

Abilash Philip Madavath, Chandra Yuvesh Aubeeluck, Augustin Raju +3

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-03

Rethinking World Models for Safety-Critical Embodied Systems

Kailang Ma, Heye Huang, Inhi Kim +1

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-03

FailBench: How Reliable are VLMs at Judging Robot Task Success?

Zaruhi Navasardyan, Tatul Danielyan, Hrant Davtyan

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Video & generative modeling

2026-09-03

R2S-Eval: Robot Evaluation with Real-to-Sim Calibration via Vision-Language Models

Yidi Wang, Feixiang Ruan, Ruoqu Chen +4

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

2026-09-03

Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving

Yuxuan Han, Kunyuan Wu, Liyunong Yang +4

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-02

Toward Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Real-World Deployment: Evaluation under Coarse Labels, Adverse Conditions, and Domain Shifts

Samir Abou Haidar, Alexandre Chariot, Mehdi Darouich +2

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

2026-09-02

A Physics-Consistent Benchmark for Contact-Rich Human-Robot Interaction in Assistive Care

Chengxiao He, Shanghai Yuan, Liuqun Fan +1

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

2026-09-02

FOCUS: Foot Observation Confidence for Robust Humanoid Proprioceptive Odometry

Kaixin Feng, Angsong Li, Shaopeng Zhang +5

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

2026-09-02

Modeling What Changes: Sparse, Residual World Models for Object-Centric Manipulation

Param Thakkar, Parsika Paresh Shah, Manisha Sushant Gote

World models Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

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