[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.