The Reality Gap: A Sim-to-Real Seminar

​The Reality Gap is a monthly working seminar on sim-to-real transfer, hosted by Rally SF and Mission Robotics and presented with Protégé. It runs September through January. Each session takes up a different part of the problem: perception, contact and manipulation, data collection, locomotion (the field's one clear success), and world models.

​The format is the same every month: a talk from a researcher working on the problem, then a working discussion over dinner. Talks are recorded. The discussion is not.

​Session one opens with [Mia], [role] at Protégé, on [talk title]. The discussion that follows sets the baseline for the series: what each person in the room is trying to transfer, where it breaks, and what's missing. We write the answers down and return to them in January.

​The room is capped at 40 and registration requires approval. Fifteen to twenty seats belong to a core group that commits to the full series; the rest open each month. The core group forms at session one.

​The seminar is for researchers and engineers training policies in simulation and deploying them on hardware, for people building simulators, and for people collecting the data underneath. Dinner is provided by Protégé, whose research team works on training data with frontier labs.

​Request a seat and include a line about what you're working on.