Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation • Hacker News Board

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#11

Post by khedoros1 » Tue, May 16, 2017, 4:40 AM UTC

erwincoumans wrote: post #8

khedoros1 wrote: post #3

This is cool. I've been working on a quadrupedal robot. I wonder if some of these tools would help me visualize and develop gaits for the robot? It looks like they would.

You could also try out pybullet, the official Python bindings for Bullet Physics which uses the same underpinnings as Roboschool: pip install pybullet and you are up and running, quickstart guide is at http://pybullet.org . It has a Minitaur quadruped robot as one of the examples.

Now, that is a minimalist website if ever I've seen one! Thank you for the recommendation.

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#12

Post by grondilu » Tue, May 16, 2017, 5:09 AM UTC

Related is NVIDIA's recent announcement of their Isaac Robot Simulator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa__wkSmWUw

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#13

Post by gradstudent » Tue, May 16, 2017, 5:59 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #5

gradstudent wrote: post #2

The videos seem to have strong control flavour. What's the hook for AI researchers?

Gait control is widely recognized as on-topic in AI robotics circles. There are sessions on this topic at the main conferences, for example.

Well, yes, but getting robots to move without falling over is not really a core AI topic; it's an application area where some AI stuff happens to be useful.

Coming from a site with a name like "Open AI" I expected some software to help promote research on workhorse AI topics such as search, planning, constraint programming, knowledge representation and automated reasoning.

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#14

Post by accurrent » Tue, May 16, 2017, 7:53 AM UTC

du_bing wrote: post #9

Huge news, waiting for open source robot simulator for long. It's so wonderful. However, the shadow and appearance are a little pale compared to MuJoCo.

Theres always gazebo and a few others.

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#15

Post by Seanny123 » Tue, May 16, 2017, 8:04 AM UTC

Has anyone done a comparison of this, gazebo, v-rep and mujoco?

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#16

Post by deepnet » Tue, May 16, 2017, 12:03 PM UTC

dpf wrote: post #6

gradstudent wrote: post #2

The videos seem to have strong control flavour. What's the hook for AI researchers?

These environments are often used as a testbed for reinforcement learning, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05477

"However, a policy that succeeds in simulation often doesn't work when deployed on a real robot. Nevertheless, often the overall gist of what the policy does in simulation remains valid in the real world. In this paper we investigate such settings, where the sequence of states traversed in simulation remains reasonable for the real world, even if the details of the controls are not, as could be the case when the key differences lie in detailed friction, contact, mass and geometry properties"

from Transfer from Simulation to Real World through Learning Deep Inverse Dynamics Model

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03518

by Christiano, Shah, Mordatch, Schneider, Blackwell, Tobin, Abbeel, & Zaremba

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#17

Post by Eridrus » Tue, May 16, 2017, 12:41 PM UTC

"This policy itself is still a multilayer perceptron, which has no internal state, so we believe that in some cases the agent uses its arms to store information." - That's a pretty surprising result to me!

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#18

Post by Kevorkian » Tue, May 16, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

This looks AMAZING. 3D games will eventually use deep learning controllers on fully simulated physical forms, instead of animations. The future is going to be amazing.

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#19

Post by cr0sh » Tue, May 16, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

Interesting...

One robotics simulator that never seems to get any love is this one:

https://assemblino.com/

Open source, browser-based, javascript, webgl, and can even control an Arduino version of your robot (via node); I'm not sure why it's such an underdog, but I suspect it's partially the name.

Note - a working github path is:

https://github.com/omni360/assemblino.js

Not sure why the links are broken on the page - maybe this project is "dead" - but the source lives on I guess...

Re: Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation

#20

Post by traverseda » Tue, May 16, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

gradstudent wrote: post #13

robotresearcher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gait control is widely recognized as on-topic in AI robotics circles. There are sessions on this topic at the main conferences, for example.

Well, yes, but getting robots to move without falling over is not really a core AI topic; it's an application area where some AI stuff happens to be useful. Coming from a site with a name like "Open AI" I expected some software to help promote research on workhorse AI topics such as search, planning, constraint programming, knowledge representation and automated reasoning.

>Coming from a site with a name like "Open AI" I expected some software to help promote research

Really? I'd expect some stuff that helps me integrate AI into whatever it is I'm building.