20 Years of Reality Gap: a few Thoughts about Simulators in Evolutionary Robotics

International audienceSimulators in Evolutionary Robotics (ER) are often considered as a "temporary evil" until experiments can be conducted on real robots. Yet, aaer 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 conndence when they predict a tness value, so that behaviors that are not accurately simulated can be avoided