[chombier]

It is difficult, but doable assuming Coulomb friction.

The two main issues are that it is computationally expensive, but also that your mechanical modeling has to closely match that of the actual robot (especially the contact model), otherwise I suspect the training data will be useless in the end.

So if you can afford an actual robot, it makes sense to do the training using it.

[tgflynn]

How computationally expensive ? Are we talking supercomputer time to simulate the few seconds it takes to grab an object ? Advanced robots are expensive too and usually much harder to get access to then computational ressources (ie. AWS).

[chombier]

It depends: rigid/non-rigid objects, stiffness for non-rigid objects, approximate/exact Coulomb model, spatial/ temporal resolutions, and solution precision.

On a typical desktop computer, that would probably range from real time for the fast/imprecise simulation, to maybe one day for a full-blown simulation.

But again, most roboticists will tell you there is a world between the simulation (even an accurate one) and the actual robot.