  Multiphysics phenomena, the coupling effects involving different aspects of
physics laws, are pervasive in the real world and can often be encountered when
performing everyday household tasks. Intelligent agents which seek to assist or
replace human laborers will need to learn to cope with such phenomena in
household task settings. To equip the agents with such kind of abilities, the
research community needs a simulation environment, which will have the
capability to serve as the testbed for the training process of these
intelligent agents, to have the ability to support multiphysics coupling
effects. Though many mature simulation software for multiphysics simulation
have been adopted in industrial production, such techniques have not been
applied to robot learning or embodied AI research. To bridge the gap, we
propose a novel simulation environment named RFUniverse. This simulator can not
only compute rigid and multi-body dynamics, but also multiphysics coupling
effects commonly observed in daily life, such as air-solid interaction,
fluid-solid interaction, and heat transfer. Because of the unique multiphysics
capacities of this simulator, we can benchmark tasks that involve complex
dynamics due to multiphysics coupling effects in a simulation environment
before deploying to the real world. RFUniverse provides multiple interfaces to
let the users interact with the virtual world in various ways, which is helpful
and essential for learning, planning, and control. We benchmark three tasks
with reinforcement learning, including food cutting, water pushing, and towel
catching. We also evaluate butter pushing with a classic planning-control
paradigm. This simulator offers an enhancement of physics simulation in terms
of the computation of multiphysics coupling effects.
