Crossing the Reality Gap: a Short Introduction to the Transferability Approach

In robotics, gradient-free optimization algorithms (e.g. evolutionary algorithms) are often used only in simulation because they require the evaluation of many candidate solutions. Nevertheless, solutions obtained in simulation often do not work well on the real device. The transferability approach aims at crossing this gap between simulation and reality by making the optimization algorithm aware of the limits of the simulation. In the present paper, we first describe the transferability function, that maps solution descriptors to a score representing how well a simulator matches the reality. We then show that this function can be learned using a regression algorithm and a few experiments with the real devices. Our results are supported by an extensive study of the reality gap for a simple quadruped robot whose control parameters are optimized. In particular, we mapped the whole search space in reality and in simulation to understand the differences between the fitness landscapes.