#sim-to-real

A collaborative robot arm caught still settling into a commanded pose on a lab bench, a braided cable running from the control cabinet to its base, the wrist force-torque sensor and part-closed gripper not yet arrived

Why the Physical World Is Harder

A language model's mistakes are cheap because its environment is a buffer it owns. A robot's environment is matter with state it did not write and cannot roll back, and every hard part of embodied AI follows from that.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 16 min read

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