It's true that making a virtual world with the richness of the real world is damn tough. I agree that giving an AGI access to real-world sensors and actuators is important, yet I also believe that a lot of teaching and learning of AGI's can be done in simulated worlds. IMO, the practical hassles of robotics are larger as the benefits, for the current stage of AGI work. However, this is largely an issue of financing -- with bucks to hire a team of robotics engineers to solve
Yes, in fact this is a common "issue" in AI. Some of the guys where I work are currently addressing this problem by building simulators which contain full physics models. Thus you don't just have an agent in the environment, but rather you have a fully simulated virtual robot - even the sensors are simulated. The virtual robot has a physical version too so it's possible to set up a virtual and an equivalent real world experiment and then compare the results to check that the two match up. Of course the idea is that when it's finished you will be able to quickly and cheaply set up detailed virtual experiments and be pretty sure that if you used the expensive real robot you would get almost identical results.
Shane
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