SplatSim: Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer of RGB Manipulation Policies Using Gaussian Splatting

Qureshi, Mohammad Nomaan, Garg, Sparsh, Yandun, Francisco, Held, David, Kantor, George, Silwal, Abhishesh

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Sim2Real transfer, particularly for manipulation policies relying on RGB images, remains a critical challenge in robotics due to the significant domain shift between synthetic and real-world visual data. In this paper, we propose SplatSim, a novel framework that leverages Gaussian Splatting as the primary rendering primitive to reduce the Sim2Real gap for RGB-based manipulation policies. By replacing traditional mesh representations with Gaussian Splats in simulators, SplatSim produces highly photorealistic synthetic data while maintaining the scalability and cost-efficiency of simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by training manipulation policies within SplatSim}and deploying them in the real world in a zero-shot manner, achieving an average success rate of 86.25%, compared to 97.5% for policies trained on real-world data.