What happened
Michelle Lu, co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology, appeared on Robot Talk Episode 164 to discuss using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills.
Why it matters
Vsim was founded in 2022 to address what Lu describes as the limitations of simulation-based robotics AI: efficiency, scalability and the sim-to-real gap.
What to watch
The test is whether Vsim's approach can close the sim-to-real gap — the difference between simulated training and real-world performance. Lu was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA.
WHO IT HITSRobotics teams that train robot skills in simulation stand to benefit if Vsim's approach delivers on the efficiency, scalability and sim-to-real issues the company targets.
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Before co-founding Vsim Technology, Michelle Lu was a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder built Isaac Gym. That framework set the template for how modern GPU-accelerated simulation-based reinforcement learning is done in robotics. In 2022, Lu and her co-founder left NVIDIA to start Vsim.
The new company's stated focus is the set of problems Lu says still hold back simulation-based robotics AI: efficiency, scalability and the sim-to-real gap. The sim-to-real gap is the difference between how a robot performs in simulation and how it performs in the real world. Lu discussed these themes on Robot Talk Episode 164, a weekly podcast about robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.
The stakes for Vsim hinge on whether its approach can actually close that gap at useful efficiency and scale, since the company was founded specifically around those three limitations rather than around a specific product milestone described in the episode.
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