git:20260813.a1cc4ea to git:20260906.525ee24

2 added, 2 removed. Audit A to A.

---

name: sim-to-real

description: Use when designing, reviewing, or operating sim-to-real workflows that move data through simulation, policy training, synthetic generation, evaluation, and loop control.

---

# Sim-To-Real

## When To Use

Use this skill for robotics teams that need configurable data and artifact flow

through simulation, policy training, synthetic data generation, evaluation, and

iteration without customer-specific names or infrastructure baked into source.

## Procedure

1. Define a run ID and run-scoped S3 prefixes before launching.

2. Import source robot, scene, or task data into the run prefix.

3. Generate or augment simulation data with configured workbench tools.

4. Train or fine-tune the policy against the run-scoped dataset and write

checkpoints to S3.

5. Evaluate the policy with deterministic metrics or a configured VLM backend.

6. Decide whether to stop, continue, or route artifacts for review based on

configurable thresholds.

## Three-Tier Contract

- CLI: use `npa workbench workflow`, `npa workbench trigger`, and tool commands

such as Genesis, LeRobot, SONIC, MJLab, Retargeting, LanceDB, Cosmos, and

VLM-eval.

- SDK: keep workflow submission and config materialization in shared helpers so

notebooks and services use the same artifact paths.

- - Workflows: `npa-workflows/vlm-eval-loop.yaml` is the executable reference for the

+ - Workflows: `workflows/testing/vlm-eval-loop.yaml` is the executable reference for the

VLM-eval gating loop (scores a whole rollout set and writes

`task_success_report.json`). The staged engine's single maintained end-to-end

- YAML is `npa/workflows/workbench/npa-workflows/sim2real.yaml`; similarly named

+ YAML is `workflows/main/sim2real.yaml`; similarly named

npa.workflow files are explicitly demo-only DSL fixtures.

`sim-to-real-pipeline.yaml` and `sim-to-real-trigger.yaml` are retired — the first ran

`npa.workflows.sim_to_real real-loop`, which raises a DeprecationWarning pointing here.

## Gotchas

- Do not hardcode customer names, event names, personal names, tenant IDs,

registry IDs, bucket names, VM IPs, or private endpoints.

- Prefer dry-run plans for data movement, autoscaling, and external service

calls when validating workflow shape.

- Keep artifacts partitioned by run ID so repeated experiments do not overwrite

each other.

- Use existing workbench tools for S3 sync, model inference, training, and VLM

evaluation instead of one-off scripts.

## Verify

```bash

npa/.venv/bin/python -m pytest npa/tests/guardrails/test_skills_index.py -q

```

The smoke test parses the sim-to-real YAMLs and confirms the workflow CLI help

loads through the installed package.