[velcroscientist]

Good point. This is why robotics researchers do not take deep RL papers seriously unless they have some real world robotics results. I'm looking at you, people who only show mujoco results and claim their algorithm is useful for robotics.

Simulators are useful though for real world robotics. You can prototype your environment and algorithm, and also attempt sim2real transfer. For example, use the simulator to generate a lot of image data, and train image based controllers. Add enough domain randomization and maybe your controller trained on the simulator can transfer to real images.