AdaptSim: Task-Driven Simulation Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Transfer
Keywords: Sim-to-real transfer, dynamic manipulation, meta-learning
TL;DR: We present AdaptSim, a framework for efficiently adapting simulation-trained task policies to the real world by adjusting simulation parameters in a task-driven fashion.
Abstract: Simulation parameter settings such as contact models and object geometry approximations are critical to training robust manipulation policies capable of transferring from simulation to real-world deployment. There is often an irreducible gap between simulation and reality: attempting to match the dynamics between simulation and reality may be infeasible and may not lead to policies that perform well in reality for a specific task. We propose AdaptSim, a new task-driven adaptation framework for sim-to-real transfer that aims to optimize task performance in target (real) environments. First, we meta-learn an adaptation policy in simulation using reinforcement learning for adjusting the simulation parameter distribution based on the current policy’s performance in a target environment. We then perform iterative real-world adaptation by inferring new simulation parameter distributions for policy training. Our extensive simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate AdaptSim achieving 1-3x asymptotic performance and ∼2x real data efficiency when adapting to different environments, compared to methods based on Sys-ID and directly training the task policy in target environments.
Submission Number: 3
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