From Digital Twins to Data Engine: Cutting the Real-Data Burden with Sim-Powered Robot Learning Teaching a robot a new task could take hundreds of teleoperated demonstrations. For foundation models, adapting to an entirely new robot can cost orders of magnitude more — dedicated hardware, trained operators, months of engineering. On @boosterobotics' dual-arm robot, we studied this at two levels: ✱ Specialist: Can task-aligned simulation mixed with a small set of real demonstrations reduce the real-data burden? ✅ Yes. With only 10 real demos, the policy made no contact at all in physical rollouts (0/20). Adding 50 simulated trajectories brought contact to 17/20. ✱ Foundation: Can data accumulated across tasks build a reusable starting point (a Booster-specific model prior)? ✅ Yes. After full-parameter continued pretraining, a model adapted with just 30 demonstrations per task beat the original given twice as many: 14/16 vs 10/16 in simulated evaluation. Before any task-specific adaptation, in zero-shot simulation, it was already roughly 3× closer to the target (17.27 cm → 5.78 cm). This work runs on Axis Suite, our Physical AI solution across different robot embodiments. Distributed contributors generate task-aligned sim data on Axis Hub at scale, reducing real-data needs for specialist adaptation while powering cross-embodiment generalist training. Read the full blog: