20 years of reality gap
Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Konstantinos I. Chatzilygeroudis · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2017
Simulators in Evolutionary Robotics (ER) are often considered as a "temporary evil" until experiments can be conducted on real robots. Yet, after more than 20 years of ER, most experiments still happen in simulation and nothing suggests that this situation will change in the next few years. In this short paper, we describe the requirements of ER from simulators, what we tried, and how we successfully crossed the "reality gap" in many experiments. We argue that future simulators need to be able to estimate their confidence when they predict a fitness value, so that behaviors that are not accurately simulated can be avoided.