simulating an environment, wherein the simulated environment includes a simulated robot controlled by an external robot controller;

intercepting a temporal sequence of robot commands issued by the robot controller to control the simulated robot in the simulated environment;

generating a temporal sequence of progressing noise values using a time series machine learning model, wherein the time series machine learning model is trained based on empirical data about effects of environmental conditions on robot joint operation;

injecting the temporal sequence of progressing noise values into corresponding robot commands of the temporal sequence of robot commands to generate noisy robot commands, wherein the injecting includes altering, skewing, biasing, or replacing existing robot command values with noisy robot command values; and

operating the simulated robot in the simulated environment based on the noisy robot commands.