Safety and cost are two important concerns for the development of autonomous
driving technologies. From the academic research to commercial applications of
autonomous driving vehicles, sufficient simulation and real world testing are
required. In general, a large scale of testing in simulation environment is
conducted and then the learned driving knowledge is transferred to the real
world, so how to adapt driving knowledge learned in simulation to reality
becomes a critical issue. However, the virtual simulation world differs from
the real world in many aspects such as lighting, textures, vehicle dynamics,
and agents' behaviors, etc., which makes it difficult to bridge the gap between
the virtual and real worlds. This gap is commonly referred to as the reality
gap (RG). In recent years, researchers have explored various approaches to
address the reality gap issue, which can be broadly classified into two
categories: transferring knowledge from simulation to reality (sim2real) and
learning in digital twins (DTs). In this paper, we consider the solutions
through the sim2real and DTs technologies, and review important applications
and innovations in the field of autonomous driving. Meanwhile, we show the
state-of-the-arts from the views of algorithms, models, and simulators, and
elaborate the development process from sim2real to DTs. The presentation also
illustrates the far-reaching effects of the development of sim2real and DTs in
autonomous driving