Abstract

Realistic physics engines play a crucial role for learning to manipulate deformable objects such as garments in simulation. By doing so, researchers can circumvent challenges such as sensing the deformation of the object in the real-world. In spite of the extensive use of simulations for this task, few works have evaluated the reality gap between deformable object simulators and real-world data. We present a benchmark dataset to evaluate the sim-to-real gap in cloth manipulation. The dataset is collected by performing a dynamic cloth manipulation task involving contact with a rigid table. We use the dataset to evaluate the reality gap, computational time, and simulation stability of four popular deformable object simulators: MuJoCo, Bullet, Flex, and SOFA. Additionally, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each simulator.

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Keywords

• Datasets for Robot Learning
• Bimanual Manipulation
• Deformable Object Manipulation

BibTeX

@article{blanco2024benchmarking,
  title={Benchmarking the sim-to-real gap in cloth manipulation},
  author={Blanco-Mulero, David and Barbany, Oriol and Alcan, Gokhan and Colom{\'e}, Adri{\`a} and Torras, Carme and Kyrki, Ville},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume={9}, 
  number={3}, 
  pages={1760--1767},
  year={2024},
  publisher={IEEE}
}