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. D-REX: Differentiable Real-to-Sim-to-Real Engine for Learning Dexterous Grasping

    Mar 1, 2026Haozhe Lou, Mingtong Zhang, Haoran Geng +9Robotic GraspingRobotics Simulation

  2. MicroPush: A Lightweight Simulator for Sim-to-Real Microrobotic Pushing and Assembly

    Feb 27, 2026Yanda Yang, Zion Lee, Sambeeta DasRobot Policy LearningRobotics Simulation

  3. Simple Models, Real Swimming: Digital Twins for Tendon-Driven Underwater Robots

    Feb 26, 2026Mike Y. Michelis, Nana Obayashi, Josie Hughes +1Underwater RoboticsRobotics Simulation

  4. CableRobotGraphSim: A Graph Neural Network for Modeling Partially Observable Cable-Driven Robot Dynamics

    Feb 24, 2026Nelson Chen, William R. Johnson, Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio +2Robotics SimulationRobot Dynamics Learning

  5. Smoothly Differentiable and Efficiently Vectorizable Contact Manifold Generation

    Feb 23, 2026Onur Beker, Andreas René Geist, Anselm Paulus +4Robotics SimulationDifferentiable Physics

  6. RotorSuite: A MATLAB/Simulink Toolbox for Tilt Multi-Rotor UAV Modeling

    Feb 21, 2026Nicola Cigarini, Giulia Michieletto, Angelo CenedeseAerial RoboticsRobotics Simulation

  7. CLASH: Collision Learning via Augmented Sim-to-real Hybridization to Bridge the Reality Gap

    Feb 21, 2026Haotian He, Ning Guo, Siqi Shi +2Sim-to-Real TransferRobotics Simulation

  8. A ROS2 Benchmarking Framework for Hierarchical Control Strategies in Mobile Robots for Mediterranean Greenhouses

    Feb 16, 2026Fernando Cañadas-Aránega, Francisco J. Mañas-Álvarez, José L- Guzmán +2Robotic ControlMobile Robotics

  9. Neurosim: A Fast Simulator for Neuromorphic Robot Perception

    Feb 16, 2026Richeek Das, Pratik ChaudhariRobotics SimulationNeuromorphic Computing

  10. RoboSolver: A Multi-Agent Large Language Model Framework for Solving Robotic Arm Problems

    Feb 16, 2026Hamid Khabazi, Ali F. Meghdari, Alireza TaheriRobot KinematicsRobotics

  11. ReaDy-Go: Real-to-Sim Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting Simulation for Environment-Specific Visual Navigation with Moving Obstacles

    Feb 12, 2026Seungyeon Yoo, Youngseok Jang, Dabin Kim +3Robotics SimulationRobot Navigation

  12. MobileManiBench: Simplifying Model Verification for Mobile Manipulation

    Feb 5, 2026Wenbo Wang, Fangyun Wei, QiXiu Li +5Mobile ManipulationRobotics Simulation

  13. Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with multipanda_ros2: A Real-Time ROS2 Framework for Multimanual Systems

    Feb 2, 2026Jon Škerlj, Seongjin Bien, Abdeldjallil Naceri +1Robotic ControlRobot Dynamics Identification

  14. From Instruction to Event: Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation

    Jan 29, 2026Hao Ju, Shaofei Huang, Hongyu Li +4Robotics SimulationMobile Robotics

  15. LogicEnvGen: Task-Logic Driven Generation of Diverse Simulated Environments for Embodied AI

    Jan 20, 2026Jianan Wang, Siyang Zhang, Bin Li +4Robotics SimulationAI Agent Evaluation

  16. TabletopGen: Tabletop Scene Generation and Interactive Simulation for Robotic Manipulation

    Dec 1, 2025Ziqian Wang, Yonghao He, Licheng Yang +6Robotic Data CollectionRobotics Simulation

  17. Rapidly Learning Soft Robot Control via Implicit Time-Stepping

    Nov 10, 2025Andrew Choi, Dezhong Tong, Xiaonan HuangRobot Policy LearningRobotics Simulation

  18. Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming

    Jul 15, 2025Asad Ali Shahid, Francesco Braghin, Loris RovedaLong-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

  19. Highly-Efficient Differentiable Simulation for Robotics

    Sep 11, 2024Quentin Le Lidec, Louis Montaut, Yann de Mont-Marin +3Robotics SimulationMultibody Dynamics

  20. Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

    Aug 31, 2018Fei Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He +3Embodied AIRobotics Simulation