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What Matters for Simulation to Online Reinforcement Learning on Real Robots

arXiv:2602.20220v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorithmic, systems, and experimental decisions that are typically left implicit in prior work. We find that some widely used defaults can be harmful, while a set of robust, readily adopted design choices within standard RL practic

Published July 24, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2602.20220v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorithmic, systems, and experimental decisions that are typically left implicit in prior work. We find that some widely used defaults can be harmful, while a set of robust, readily adopted design choices within standard RL practice yield stable learning across tasks and hardware. These results provide the first large-sample empirical study of such design choices, enabling practitioners to deploy online RL with lower engineering effort.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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