Facilitating Sim-to-Real by Intrinsic Stochasticity of Real-Time Simulation in Reinforcement Learning for Robot Manipulation

Simulation is essential to reinforcement learning (RL) before implementation in the real world, especially for safety-critical applications like robot manipulation. Conventionally, RL agents are sensitive to the discrepancies between the simulation and the real world, known as the sim-to-real gap. The application of domain randomization, a technique used to fill this gap, is limited to the imposition of heuristic-randomized models. We investigate the properties of intrinsic stochasticity of real-time simulation (RT-IS) of off-the-shelf simulation software and its potential to improve the RL performance. This improvement includes a higher tolerance to noise and model imprecision and superiority to conventional domain randomization in terms of ease of use and automation. First, we conduct analytical studies to measure the correlation of RT-IS with the utilization of computer hardware and validate its comparability with the natural stochasticity of a physical robot. Then, we exploit the RT-IS feature in the training of an RL agent. The simulation and physical experiment results verify the feasibility and applicability of RT-IS to robust agent training for robot manipulation tasks. The RT-IS-powered RL agent outperforms conventional agents on robots with modeling uncertainties. RT-IS requires less heuristic randomization is not task-dependent, and achieves better generalizability than the conventional domain-randomization-powered agents. Our findings provide a new perspective on the sim-to-real problem in practical applications like robot manipulation tasks.