Overview

Robotics simulation studies how to represent robot bodies, sensors, environments, and interactions so researchers can test control and learning safely and repeatably before hardware deployment. Approaches range from rigid-body and contact physics engines such as MuJoCo and Isaac Sim, to finite-element models for soft materials, differentiable or learned dynamics, and generated scenes for navigation and manipulation. GPU-parallel reinforcement learning, synthetic demonstrations, digital twins, and simulation-in-the-loop planning help scale training, while benchmarks and hardware-in-the-loop tests assess transfer. The central tension is balancing physical and sensor fidelity with speed and reproducibility: visual realism alone does not ensure correct interactions, and simulated success does not always predict real-world performance without calibration and validation.

Latest papers

CardsList

322 papers59 papers in the last four weeks, up 64% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Gym-Anything for Robotics: Scaling physical simulations with digital agents

    Oct 29, 2026Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean WelleckRobotics SimulationRobotic RL

  2. DexSuite: An All-in-One Framework for Dexterous Manipulation Across Arms, Hands, and Tasks

    Oct 27, 2026Anas Houssaini, Hugo He, Junming Shi +19Robotic ManipulationRobotics Simulation

  3. Rendering-Free Event Frame Simulation for Fast Reinforcement Learning of Autonomous Robot Navigation

    Oct 27, 2026Dequan Ou, Austin Lopez, Quentin Missinne +2Robotics SimulationEvent-Based Vision

  4. SPECOLA: A Tool for Specification Driven Robot Evaluation

    Oct 26, 2026Immanuel Ampomah Mensah, Hadas Kress-GazitRobotic Policy EvaluationRobotics Simulation

  5. SceneAgent: An Agentic Pipeline from 3D and 4D Captures to Simulation Environments

    Oct 26, 2026Luke Hollis, Tianxing Fan, Heng YangRobotics SimulationPhysics-Aware 3D Scene Reconstruction

  6. How High Can GPT-6 Astra Climb in Contact-Rich Manipulation? PhysLadder: A Hierarchical, Matched Sim-Real Benchmark for Physical Interaction

    Oct 25, 2026Haibao Yu, Jiaqi Meng, Zijian Zhang +16Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

  7. Enabling Motion-Induced WiFi-CSI Sensing in Multi-Robot Systems: A Simulation Framework

    Oct 25, 2026Brendan Dijkstra, Ninad Jadhav, Maurice Stoffijn +2Wi-Fi SensingWireless Localization

  8. Replicate What Varies: Resource Sharing for Domain-Randomized Embodied Simulation

    Oct 24, 2026Zixu Hao, Weijun Wang, Xiangyu Li +4Robotics SimulationPhysics-Based Simulation

  9. Regularised RL improves sim-to-real transfer

    Oct 23, 2026Danilo Vucetic, Mohamad H. Danesh, Florence Clerc +2Regularized RLReinforcement Learning

  10. WorldMirror: Agentic Real-to-Sim Generation of Interactive Worlds from In-the-Wild Robot Demonstrations

    Oct 22, 2026Tianling Xu, Weijie Wan, Honghao Su +9Robotics SimulationDigital Twins

  11. HyperDrone: Simulation-to-Reality Transfer at Millions of Frames per Second

    Oct 20, 2026Jonas Eschmann, Giuseppe LoiannoRobotics SimulationGPU Acceleration

  12. MARE: An Open-Source Lunar Rover Simulator with Shadow Ground Truth for Perception and Autonomy

    Oct 20, 2026Raúl Castilla-Arquillo, Miguel Olivares-MendezRobotics SimulationPlanetary Rover Robotics

  13. ForagerSim: Evaluating Embodied Map-Based Reasoning in Large-Scale Dynamic Worlds

    Oct 19, 2026Tomáš Musil, Martin Kotík, Michal Vavrečka +3Embodied NavigationEmbodied Agent Benchmarks

  14. PhySGA: A Physics-Space Grounded Agentic Framework for Generalizable and Interactive 3D Composition

    Oct 14, 2026Weichen Lyu, Chong Xia, Mingyu Dong +33D Scene GenerationRobotic Assembly

  15. A Master-to-Simulation Interface with Demonstration-Trajectory Guidance for Vascular Intervention

    Oct 14, 2026Mingyu Zou, Shuxiang Guo, Sheng Cao +4Robotic Endovascular InterventionRobotic Manipulation

  16. Probabilistic Physics Digital Twin for Human-Robot Interaction

    Oct 14, 2026Yushen Hu, Harshvardhan Chandirasekar, Apurv Kushwaha +2Digital TwinsRobotics Simulation

  17. EmbodiedEvo: Self-Evolving Coding Agent For Physical Intelligence

    Oct 13, 2026Wenyi Li, Yizhe Chi, Youjie Zheng +8Self-Improving AgentsRobot Skill Learning

  18. RoboSimStudio: An Interactive Toolkit for Human and Agent Rapid Real2Sim of Robot Manipulation Tasks

    Oct 13, 2026Kaiyuan Chen, Shuangyu Xie, Uksang Yoo +9Real-to-Sim TransferRobotics Simulation

  19. DexNinja: Learning Robust Dexterous Cutting Policy with a Real-to-Sim-to-Real Data Engine

    Oct 12, 2026Haozhe Lou, Runyi Yang, Wanqi Zhong +10Sim-to-Real TransferContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  20. An Open MuJoCo Simulation Framework for a Quadrotor Carrying a Tendon-Driven Soft Continuum Arm

    Oct 11, 2026Haitham El-HussienyAerial ManipulationRobotics Simulation

  21. DexBioLab: Benchmarking Dexterous Manipulation with Dynamic Experimental Phenomena in Realistic Laboratories

    Oct 9, 2026Xuanye Wu, Yue Shi, Yongcan Yang +8Robot Manipulation BenchmarksRobotic Manipulation

  22. SpatialHarness: Test-Time Spatial Scaffolding for Fine Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 8, 2026Jiayu Wang, Yue Yu, Bin Zhu +2Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

  23. Sim-to-Real RL for ASVs using SysID

    Oct 8, 2026Cody Sheltraw, Tsimafei Lazouski, Maani Ghaffari +1Sim-to-Real TransferRobotics Simulation

  24. SimVLA: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Learning for Mobile Manipulation

    Oct 8, 2026Kyoungin Baik, Youngwoon LeeSim-to-Real TransferVision-Language-Action Models