Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware

Project Page | arXiv

Justin Yu*, Letian Fu*, Huang Huang, Karim El-Refai, Rares Ambrus, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ken Goldberg

University of California, Berkeley | Toyota Research Institute *Equal contribution

• September 22nd, 2025: Initial release (real-to-sim pipeline, data generation pipeline, assets dataset, policy training infrastructure)
• Coming Soon! Release converted datasets for diffusion policy and π₀-FAST to Hugging Face
• Integrate GraspNet-baseline for better grasp generation

TLDR; Real2Render2Real (R2R2R) is a scalable pipeline for generating data to train generalist manipulation policies - without dynamics simulation or teleoperation.

The code used in this project to deploy high-frequency visuomotor policies on the YuMi IRB14000 robot is hosted on repo uynitsuj/yumi_realtime

Clone the repo and its submodules with:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/uynitsuj/real2render2real.git

The submodules will be installed in dependencies/.

We have three environments for each step in the pipeline: real-to-sim asset and trajectory extraction, 3DGS-to-mesh, and data generation.

If you want to go directly to data generation, unzip outputs.zip and data.zip in the root of the repo and head to Data Generation.

Set up your environment using conda and follow the install steps in env_real_to_sim.sh

The scans and demonstrations for all of our objects and tasks can be found here. We additionally provide all of the outputs from our asset and trajectory extraction in outputs.zip found here if you want to better follow along or go directly to data generation.

Set up the conda environment for running real-to-sim by following the install outlined in env_real_to_sim.sh.

To capture your own objects you should follow this guide. All of our objects were captured using a LiDAR-supported iPhone with Polycam. For your demonstration videos we recommend recording it in a similar manner as we have done here.

Note: if you aren't training from scratch and are using our provided GARField and DiG outputs you will have to edit the data path to reflect the scan's path on your machine in the config.yml for GARField and DiG.

1. Train GARField We train GARField for 8000 steps by running the following in the root of the repo: ns-train garfield --data <path/to/datasetname>. This will produce an output config file inside output/datasetname/garfield/<timestamp>/config.yml. Example run:

ns-train garfield --data scans/coffee_maker

2. Train DiG We then train DiG for 8000 steps, once again running in the root of the repo: ns-train dig --data <path/to/data/directory> --pipeline.garfield-ckpt <path/to/config.yml>, using the output config file from the GARField training. Example run:

ns-train dig --data scans/coffee_maker  --pipeline.garfield-ckpt outputs/coffee_maker/garfield/2025-02-16_195942/config.yml

3. Segment the model: inside the viewer for DiG, you should see the following GUI:

We require hand tracking to sample grasps so please follow the steps to install HaMeR, this will involve downloading model weights. Make sure that their demo script runs properly before continuing!

Example run:

conda activate r2r2r_rsrd
python dependencies/rsrd/scripts/run_tracker.py  --is-obj-jointed False --dig-config-path outputs/cardboard_box/dig/2025-04-18_204749/config.yml  --video-path demonstrations/cardboard_box_lift.MOV --output-dir outputs/cardboard_box/track --save-hand`

Set up the conda environment for running SuGaR by following the steps in env_3dgs_to_mesh.sh

Training SuGaR:

conda activate r2r2r_sugar
python dependencies/SuGaR/full_train_pipeline.py -s /home/<user>/real2render2real/outputs/cardboard_box/state_rigid_20250418_205353

After creating the mesh the normals may not be correct and the grasps generated initially from RSRD might not be the best. We refine these by running:

conda activate r2r2r_rsrd
python dependencies/rsrd/scripts/dev_grasp.py --dig-config /home/<user>/real2render2real/outputs/cardboard_box/dig/2025-04-18_204749/config.yml

This will produce a mesh with updated normals called <mesh_name>_fixed_normals_centered.obj and generate a new track folder. Ensure that the track folder is named just track.

The environment for data generation is managed using uv. The instructions for manual installation are included in env_data_gen.sh.

Download and unzip data.zip from here into the root of the repo. This contains all of the assets we use for our tasks. If you haven't already, also download outputs.zip from here into the root of the repo. These are all of our tracked and grouped objects along with their meshes (this folder is ~50GB unzipped).

If you're using a new asset mesh you will have to convert it into a usd by running a variation of the following:

source .venv/bin/activate
python dependencies/IsaacLab/scripts/tools/convert_mesh.py outputs/cardboard_box/state_rigid_20250418_205353/sugarfine_3Dgs7000_
densityestim02_sdfnorm02_level005_decim200000_normalconsistency01_gaussperface6_fixed_normals_centered.obj outputs/cardboard_box/state_rigid_20250418_205353/usd/sugarfine_3Dgs7000_densityestim02
_sdfnorm02_level005_decim200000_normalconsistency01_gaussperface6_fixed_normals_centered.usd --make-instanceable --collision-approximation none --mass 1.0

Then make sure to include the path of the usd you want to use in the [robot]_scene_cfg.py for the given task.

You can run data generation by running:

python scripts/run.py

Uncomment the scene_config and simulator of the environment you want to simulate.

This will generate a series of folders in output_data/<task_name>/ with output_data/<task_name>/successes/ being successful rollouts that you should use for training.

To do table randomization you will need to go to vMaterials and make an NVIDIA developer account. If you're using linux select vMatierals X.Y for Linux and it will install a .run executable. In a terminal run chmod +x <executable>.run then sudo ./<executable>.run it will then ask if you want to set system-global files to set the variable "MDL_USER_PATH" to "/opt/nvidia/mdl/vMaterials_2/" we selected yes. Now in whatever simulator you're using make sure to uncomment randomize_table() and run source .venv/bin/activate && python scripts/run.py in a new terminal!

For π₀-FAST policy training see https://github.com/Max-Fu/openpi/tree/main for details. You will need to convert the generated R2R2R data into the proper format using this script: convert_dpgs_data.py

For diffusion policy training see https://github.com/Max-Fu/tinydp for details.

• No module named vitpose_model in _hamer_helper.py: you can edit the file and include the following lines below hamer_directory = ...

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, str(hamer_directory.absolute()))
from vitpose_model import ViTPoseModel

• "ValueError: target_reduction must be between 0 and 1" when performing analytical grasp sampling & scoring: this may be due to an outdated trimesh version. To resolve this, try changing _mesh = _mesh.simplify_quadric_decimation(150) in line 315 in dependencies/rsrd/rsrd/robot/graspable_object.py to _mesh.simplify_quadric_decimation(face_count=150)
• If you encounter issues with gsplat not building correctly try uninstalling gsplat and reinstalling with this command:

NVCC_FLAGS="-gencode=arch=compute_80,code=sm_80 -gencode=arch=compute_80,code=sm_80" pip install git+https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/gsplat.git@v1.4.0

• Viser import "No module named 'websockets.asyncio': Consult asyncio_error.md for steps to debug.
• Cannot import cmake when running ./isaaclab.sh --install or egl_probe error: try to make sure it is pointing to a compiled cmake and not one installed from pip. Also try to run ./isaaclab_alt.sh --install

If you find this useful, please cite the paper!

@misc{yu2025real2render2realscalingrobotdata,
      title={Real2Render2Real: Scaling Robot Data Without Dynamics Simulation or Robot Hardware}, 
      author={Justin Yu and Letian Fu and Huang Huang and Karim El-Refai and Rares Andrei Ambrus and Richard Cheng and Muhammad Zubair Irshad and Ken Goldberg},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2505.09601},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09601}, 
}