English

PolySim: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Humanoid Control via Multi-Simulator Dynamics Randomization

Robotics 2025-10-15 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Humanoid whole-body control (WBC) policies trained in simulation often suffer from the sim-to-real gap, which fundamentally arises from simulator inductive bias, the inherent assumptions and limitations of any single simulator. These biases lead to nontrivial discrepancies both across simulators and between simulation and the real world. To mitigate the effect of simulator inductive bias, the key idea is to train policies jointly across multiple simulators, encouraging the learned controller to capture dynamics that generalize beyond any single simulator's assumptions. We thus introduce PolySim, a WBC training platform that integrates multiple heterogeneous simulators. PolySim can launch parallel environments from different engines simultaneously within a single training run, thereby realizing dynamics-level domain randomization. Theoretically, we show that PolySim yields a tighter upper bound on simulator inductive bias than single-simulator training. In experiments, PolySim substantially reduces motion-tracking error in sim-to-sim evaluations; for example, on MuJoCo, it improves execution success by 52.8 over an IsaacSim baseline. PolySim further enables zero-shot deployment on a real Unitree G1 without additional fine-tuning, showing effective transfer from simulation to the real world. We will release the PolySim code upon acceptance of this work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.01708,
  title  = {PolySim: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Humanoid Control via Multi-Simulator Dynamics Randomization},
  author = {Zixing Lei and Zibo Zhou and Sheng Yin and Yueru Chen and Qingyao Xu and Weixin Li and Yunhong Wang and Bowei Tang and Wei Jing and Siheng Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.01708},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:12:29.403Z