Simulation: A Game-Changer#
Fortunately, simulation offers a solution to many of these problems. At NVIDIA, we’ve developed expertise in this area, and it’s become a core part of the Omniverse platform.
Benefits of Simulation#
Speed: Simulations can run much faster than real-time. For example, with the rough terrain locomotion task using the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, one second in simulation in Isaac Lab on a GeForce RTX™ 4090 GPU equates to about 27 minutes of real-world experience. This dramatically accelerates the learning process.
Access to Information: In a simulation, you have access to all the data about the robot and its environment. This “privileged information” can be invaluable for training and debugging.
Scenario Generation: You can procedurally generate an infinite number of scenarios, exposing the robot to a wide range of situations it might encounter in the real world.how
Sim-to-Real Transfer#
This is where the concept of sim-to-real comes into play. The process involves training a policy in simulation, then transferring it to the real robot.
Training in Simulation vs Zero-Shot Deployment
ANYmal parkour: Learning agile navigation for quadrupedal robots. (Published in Science Robotics, https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scirobotics.adi7566)
In practice, this means taking the weights of the trained neural network and loading that file onto the robot’s hardware for inference–this is how you tell the robot what to do.
However, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. There’s a catch.