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. PhySPRING: Structure-Preserving Reduction of Physics-Informed Twins via GNN

    May 8, 2026Yixiong Jing, Xingyuan Chen, Guangming Wang +3Graph Neural NetworksRobotics Simulation

  2. Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation

    May 7, 2026Yixin Zhu, Zixiong Wang, Jian Yang +4Robotics SimulationSim-to-Real Transfer

  3. ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue

    May 2, 2026Daoxuan Zhang, Ping Chen, Jianyi Zhou +1Aerial RoboticsRobotics Simulation

  4. MiniVLA-Nav v1: A Multi-Scene Simulation Dataset for Language-Conditioned Robot Navigation

    May 1, 2026Ali Al-Bustami, Jaerock KwonRobotic Data CollectionRobotics Simulation

  5. Lucid-XR: An Extended-Reality Data Engine for Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 30, 2026Yajvan Ravan, Adam Rashid, Alan Yu +8Robotic Data CollectionRobotics Simulation

  6. Simulating Infant First-Person Sensorimotor Experience via Motion Retargeting from Babies to Humanoids

    Apr 30, 2026Francisco M. López, Hoshinori Kanazawa, Ondrej Fiala +8Robotics SimulationSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

  7. DOT-Sim: Differentiable Optical Tactile Simulation with Precise Real-to-Sim Physical Calibration

    Apr 30, 2026Yang You, Won Kyung Do, Aiden Swann +3Tactile SensingRobotics Simulation

  8. 3D Generation for Embodied AI and Robotic Simulation: A Survey

    Apr 29, 2026Tianwei Ye, Yifan Mao, Minwen Liao +63D Asset GenerationRobotics Simulation

  9. KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning

    Apr 28, 2026Yixuan Huang, Bowen Li, Vaibhav Saxena +9Robot Task PlanningRobot Learning

  10. asRoBallet: Closing the Sim2Real Gap via Friction-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Underactuated Spherical Dynamics

    Apr 27, 2026Fang Wan, Guangyi Huang, Tianyu Wu +5Humanoid Robot LocomotionReinforcement Learning

  11. SPLIT: Separating Physical-Contact via Latent Arithmetic in Image-Based Tactile Sensors

    Apr 27, 2026Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-GuerreroVision-Based Tactile SensingDisentangled Representation Learning

  12. LeHome: A Simulation Environment for Deformable Object Manipulation in Household Scenarios

    Apr 24, 2026Zeyi Li, Yushi Yang, Shawn Xie +15Robotics SimulationDeformable Object Manipulation

  13. ETac: A Lightweight and Efficient Tactile Simulation Framework for Learning Dexterous Manipulation

    Apr 22, 2026Zhe Xu, Feiyu Zhao, Xiyan Huang +1Robotic GraspingRobotics Simulation

  14. Achieving Interaction Fluidity in a Wizard-of-Oz Robotic System: A Prototype for Fluid Error-Correction

    Apr 21, 2026Carlos Baptista De Lima, Julian Hough, Frank Förster +2Robotics SimulationHuman-Robot Interaction

  15. FLASH: Fast Learning via GPU-Accelerated Simulation for High-Fidelity Deformable Manipulation in Minutes

    Apr 19, 2026Siyuan Luo, Bingyang Zhou, Chong Zhang +9Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotics Simulation

  16. Web-Gewu: A Browser-Based Interactive Playground for Robot Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 18, 2026Kaixuan Chen, Linqi YeRobotics SimulationAI in Education

  17. E2E-Fly: An Integrated Training-to-Deployment System for End-to-End Quadrotor Autonomy

    Apr 14, 2026Fangyu Sun, Fanxing Li, Linzuo Zhang +5Quadrotor ControlSim-to-Real Transfer

  18. Habitat-GS: A High-Fidelity Navigation Simulator with Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

    Apr 14, 2026Ziyuan Xia, Jingyi Xu, Chong Cui +9Robotics SimulationEmbodied AI

  19. AffordSim: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark for Affordance-Aware Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 13, 2026Mingyang Li, Haofan Xu, Haowen Sun +10Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Datasets

  20. ComSim: Building Scalable Real-World Robot Data Generation via Compositional Simulation

    Apr 13, 2026Yiran Qin, Jiahua Ma, Li Kang +11Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobotics Simulation

  21. Fast-SegSim: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Robotics in Simulation

    Apr 13, 2026Xuan Yu, Yuxuan Xie, Shichao Zhai +3Open-Vocabulary 3D SegmentationPanoptic Segmentation

  22. RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies

    Apr 10, 2026Jenai Xuning Yang, Rishit Dagli, Alex Zook +5Robotic Policy EvaluationRobot Policy Generalization

  23. Simulation of Adaptive Running with Flexible Sports Prosthesis using Reinforcement Learning of Hybrid-link System

    Apr 10, 2026Yuta Shimane, Ko YamamotoAssistive RoboticsRobotics Simulation

  24. AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection

    Apr 9, 2026Sasanka Kuruppu Arachchige, Juan Jose Garcia, Changda Tian +4Aerial RoboticsRobotic Inspection

  25. Logical Robots: Declarative Multi-Agent Programming in Logica

    Apr 8, 2026Evgeny Skvortsov, Yilin Xia, Ojaswa Garg +2Multi-Agent SystemsRobotics Simulation

  26. Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameterization for Contact-Rich Granular Scooping with a Soft Conical Robotic Hand

    Apr 7, 2026Yongliang Wang, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Tomoya Takahashi +1Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  27. CoEnv: Driving Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration via Compositional Environment

    Apr 7, 2026Li Kang, Yutao Fan, Rui Li +11Multi-Robot CoordinationMulti-Task Robotic Manipulation

  28. Tac2Real: Reliable and GPU Visuotactile Simulation for Online Reinforcement Learning and Zero-Shot Real-World Deployment

    Mar 30, 2026Ningyu Yan, Shuai Wang, Xing Shen +4Robotics SimulationSim-to-Real Transfer