Best of Sim and Real: Decoupled Visuomotor Manipulation via Learning Control in Simulation and Perception in Real

Abstract

Sim-to-real transfer remains a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation due to the entanglement of perception and control in end-to-end learning. We present a decoupled framework that learns each component where it is most reliable: control policies are trained in simulation with privileged state to master spatial layouts and manipulation dynamics, while perception is adapted only at deployment to bridge real observations to the frozen control policy. Our key insight is that control strategies and action patterns are universal across environments and can be learned in simulation through systematic randomization, while perception is inherently domain-specific and must be learned where visual observations are authentic. Unlike existing end-to-end approaches that require extensive real-world data, our method achieves strong performance with only 10-20 real demonstrations by reducing the complex sim-to-real problem to a structured perception alignment task. We validate our approach on tabletop manipulation tasks, demonstrating superior data efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization compared to end-to-end baselines. The learned policies successfully handle object positions and scales beyond the training distribution, confirming that decoupling perception from control fundamentally improves sim-to-real transfer.