This is really good news. It was a really contentious issue in RL and robotics research to be so reliant on proprietary (and very expensive) software.
For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars.
Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#12I wonder what this means for the future of Brax [1].
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#13This is really good news. It was a really contentious issue in RL and robotics research to be so reliant on proprietary (and very expensive) software.
For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars .
For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#14Is this a competitor to physX?
Nope. PhysX is all about realtime and gaming is the end use it was designed around. TFA has a section about why that’s bad. The different end uses mean there are miles of differences between them even though they’re both physics simulators.
A lot of RL problems can be adequately simulated in either Mujoco or PhysX. So even though as you pointed out they have key differences, there is a pretty big overlap in use cases. So in that sense, I believe it still does qualify as competition.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#15I wonder what this means for the future of Brax [1]. 1. https://github.com/google/brax
Google Research already maintains the Bullet Engine as well (although it mostly seems to be Erwin Coumans maintaing it)
Each have their own strengths, there is no "definitive" physics engine. Bullet is probably the most generalist engine, but it suffers a bit because of this approach (it's split between the old 2.0 C++ API vs. the new PyBullet API with vastly different functionalities)
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars .
For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
But they can accept that the world is not geared towards amateur dabblers, and that a few hundreds of $ for a license (a license, meaning to legalize production usage, you can always copy from somewhere to "dabble") is nothing.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars .
For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
as an undergrad in the 90s I invested thousands of dollars of my own money to work on machine learning. Worth every penny, even if I had to miss out on some cool parties.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. PhysX is all about realtime and gaming is the end use it was designed around. TFA has a section about why that’s bad. The different end uses mean there are miles of differences between them even though they’re both physics simulators.
A lot of RL problems can be adequately simulated in either Mujoco or PhysX. So even though as you pointed out they have key differences, there is a pretty big overlap in use cases. So in that sense, I believe it still does qualify as competition.
I have personally spent tons of time dealing with models exploiting physics issues. It’s a major issue. It’s true that either can adequately simulate the setups, but is it true that either can be equally exploited? I genuinely don’t know. I kinda assumed physx is more exploitable.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
as an undergrad in the 90s I invested thousands of dollars of my own money to work on machine learning. Worth every penny, even if I had to miss out on some cool parties.
Wonderful that you had thousands of dollars as an undergrad to be able to do so.
Re: Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
For undergrad students trying to dabble in reinforcement learning, several hundreds of dollars can be quite a lot.
But they can accept that the world is not geared towards amateur dabblers, and that a few hundreds of $ for a license (a license, meaning to legalize production usage, you can always copy from somewhere to "dabble") is nothing.
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