Abstract:In recent years, reinforcement learning methods based on environmental interactions have achieved great success in robotic applications, providing a practical and feasible solution for optimizing the behavior control strategies of robots. However, collecting interactive samples in the real world can lead to problems such as high cost and low efficiency. Therefore, the simulation environment is widely used in the training process of robot reinforcement learning. By obtaining a large number of training samples at a low cost in the virtual simulation environment for strategy training and transferring learning strategies to the real world, the security, reliability, and real-time problems in the real robot training process can be alleviated. However, due to the difference between the simulation environment and the real environment, it is often difficult to obtain ideal performance when directly transferring the strategy trained in the simulation environment to the real robot. To solve this problem, sim-to-real transfer reinforcement learning methods are proposed to reduce the environmental gap, so as to achieve effective strategy transfer. According to the direction of information flow in the process of transfer reinforcement learning and the different objects targeted by intelligent methods, this survey first proposes a sim-to-real transfer reinforcement learning framework, based on which the existing related work is then divided into three categories: the model optimization methods focusing on the real environment, the knowledge transfer methods focusing on the simulation environment, and the iterative policy promotion methods focusing on both simulation and real environments. Then, the representative technologies and related work in each category are described. Finally, the opportunities and challenges in this field are briefly discussed.