[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"branding":3,"analytics":7,"article-a-million-simulated-demos-teach-robots-to-open-things":10,"sections":35},{"siteName":4,"siteTagline":5,"publisherName":4,"contactEmail":6},"The Revision","Tech news, decoded.","editor@therevision.news",{"gaMeasurementId":8,"adsenseClientId":9},"G-ZW2MV82GYR","ca-pub-8533917693782264",{"article":11},{"id":12,"slug":13,"title":14,"dek":15,"body_md":16,"tags_json":17,"published_at":18,"created_at":19,"updated_at":20,"status":21,"review_note":22,"review_notes":23,"image_url":22,"persona_id":22,"persona_name":22,"section":24,"tags":25,"sources":30,"feedback":34,"feedback_at":22,"cost_usd":34,"total_tokens":34},10651,"a-million-simulated-demos-teach-robots-to-open-things","A Million Simulated Demos Teach Robots to Open Things","SMART pretrains a robot AI on over a million synthetic demonstrations and transfers that skill to real doors and drawers without additional training.","A robot that's never touched a real door just learned to open one anyway.\n\nResearchers built SMART, a system that generates synthetic manipulation demonstrations in a custom simulator called SMART-Sim. The pipeline produced over 1 million demonstrations spanning 44 atomic task types, 5 robot setups, and 2,507 articulated objects, think cabinets, drawers, and hinges, anything with moving, constrained parts. That data pretrained a vision-language-action model, the type of AI that maps camera input and instructions directly to robot motor commands. The resulting model transferred to real-world tasks with zero additional training on physical robots, a result called zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and also scored competitively on simulation benchmarks.\n\nArticulated objects are the stubborn case in robot learning. Doors, drawers, and hinges require precise, constraint-following contact that is slow and expensive to demonstrate by hand at scale. Prior synthetic-data efforts covered a narrow slice of object types; scaling to over 2,500 objects across dozens of task categories is the actual claim worth watching, since it targets one of the bigger bottlenecks in getting general-purpose robots out of the lab.\n\nSimulators have promised sim-to-real breakthroughs before. The real test is whether SMART's robots can handle the doors and drawers nobody thought to model in advance.","[\"robotics\",\"sim-to-real\",\"synthetic-data\",\"vision-language-action\"]","2026-10-07T04:00:00.000Z","2026-10-09T01:26:20.857Z","2026-10-09T01:26:24.639Z","published",null,[],"ai",[26,27,28,29],"robotics","sim-to-real","synthetic-data","vision-language-action",[31],{"name":32,"url":33},"arXiv cs.AI","https:\u002F\u002Farxiv.org\u002Fabs\u002F2610.07652",0,{"sections":36},[37,41,46,51,56,61,65,70,75,79,84,89,94,99],{"name":38,"slug":24,"count":39,"latest_published_at":40},"AI",6506,"2026-10-07T18:45:00.000Z",{"name":42,"slug":43,"count":44,"latest_published_at":45},"Security","security",911,"2026-10-07T19:53:42.000Z",{"name":47,"slug":48,"count":49,"latest_published_at":50},"Policy","policy",474,"2026-10-07T18:23:21.000Z",{"name":52,"slug":53,"count":54,"latest_published_at":55},"Deals","deals",453,"2026-10-07T23:58:31.000Z",{"name":57,"slug":58,"count":59,"latest_published_at":60},"Hardware","hardware",222,"2026-10-07T21:19:54.000Z",{"name":62,"slug":63,"count":64,"latest_published_at":18},"Science","science",187,{"name":66,"slug":67,"count":68,"latest_published_at":69},"Consumer Tech","consumer-tech",174,"2026-10-07T17:41:41.000Z",{"name":71,"slug":72,"count":73,"latest_published_at":74},"Software","software",113,"2026-10-07T18:10:00.000Z",{"name":76,"slug":77,"count":73,"latest_published_at":78},"Startups","startups","2026-10-07T23:36:57.000Z",{"name":80,"slug":81,"count":82,"latest_published_at":83},"Dev Tools","dev-tools",105,"2026-10-07T16:59:11.000Z",{"name":85,"slug":86,"count":87,"latest_published_at":88},"General","general",61,"2026-10-07T22:00:24.000Z",{"name":90,"slug":91,"count":92,"latest_published_at":93},"Gaming","gaming",56,"2026-10-07T12:00:00.000Z",{"name":95,"slug":96,"count":97,"latest_published_at":98},"Reviews","reviews",33,"2026-10-05T11:57:17.000Z",{"name":100,"slug":101,"count":102,"latest_published_at":103},"How-To","how-to",8,"2026-10-05T09:00:00.000Z"]