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Very cool line of work and emergent behaviors are so fascinating and solving NIST standard is very impressive! This just shows robot dexterity doesnt necessarily always need hands atleast for industrial assembly tasks. Came across your CoRL publication before I found alphaNIST. I was curious how much simulation asset engineering and sysID/tuning was needed for transfer to the real robot?

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Thank you so much for your kind words!

Ensuring the assets are "CAD-level accurate" has a huge impact on making this work in practice. So much so, that our collaborators Yash Narang [1] and Iretiayo Akinola [2] have spent a number of years on just this - we are standing on the shoulders of giants!

Additionally, understanding the hardware well (including things like motor and controller dynamics) is non-negotiable. We learned the hard way that there is, in fact, no free lunch. You really have to get the deep understanding of physics and engineering right.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=M3NuG7AAAAAJ&hl=en [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=e1zesfMAAAAJ&hl=en

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