Visual Sim-to-Real Learning for Robotic Insertion under Geometric Variations: Application to Rebar Installation

Published September 18, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2609.20477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rebar insertion is among the most repetitive and physically demanding tasks on construction sites, and a contact-rich problem at 1.4 mm clearance. The parts, however, vary at two levels: a nominal design per structural member, and fabrication tolerance around each nominal design. Real-world data therefore has to be re-collected as designs and batches change. We present RebarSim, a visual sim-to-real system trained entirely in simulation. A privileged state-based teacher is trained with reinforcement learning over procedurally generated rebar geometries, then distilled into a multi-view student that maps raw RGB and proprioception directly to actions under extensive domain randomization. The student transfers to the real world zero-shot, seating rebars taken from a real factory production run in 91.3% of real-robot rollouts. Underlying that result, geometry diversity and pretraining both bring benefits. Training across a diverse set of nominal designs rather than one lifts the zero-shot success of both the teacher and the student on unseen designs, and the student policy outperforms a single-design specialist on that specialist's own design. A pretrained student then adapts to a new design with 4--6x fewer distillation samples than one trained from scratch. Visual sim-to-real transfer depends on appearance randomization and the DAgger mixture: removing either one sharply lowers success. Videos, code, and task assets are available at https://rebarsim.github.io.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

• GAVEL: Graph World Models for Verified and Efficient Long-Horizon LLM Task Planning
• Time-Efficient Iterative Learning Planning for Safety-Critical Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
• MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models