robosuite 1.3.0 Release Notes

• Highlights
• New Features
• Improvements
• Critical Bug Fixes
• Other Bug Fixes

Highlights

This release of robosuite brings powerful rendering functionalities including new renderers and multiple vision modalities, in addition to some general-purpose camera utilties. Below, we discuss the key details of these new features:

Renderers

In addition to the native Mujoco renderer, we present two new renderers, NVISII and iGibson, and introduce a standardized rendering interface API to enable easy swapping of renderers.

NVISII is a high-fidelity ray-tracing renderer originally developed by NVIDIA, and adapted for plug-and-play usage in robosuite. It is primarily used for training perception models and visualizing results in high quality. It can run at up to ~0.5 fps using a GTX 1080Ti GPU. Note that NVISII must be installed (pip install nvisii) in order to use this renderer.

iGibson is a much faster renderer that additionally supports physics-based rendering (PBR) and direct rendering to pytorch tensors. While not as high-fidelity as NVISII, it is incredibly fast and can run at up to ~1500 fps using a GTX 1080Ti GPU. Note that iGibson must be installed (pip install igibson) in order to use this renderer.

With the addition of these new renderers, we also introduce a standardized renderer for easy usage and customization of the various renderers. During each environment step, the renderer updates its internal state by calling update() and renders by calling render(...). The resulting visual observations can be polled by calling get_pixel_obs() or by calling other methods specific to individual renderers. We provide a demo script for testing each new renderer, and our docs also provide additional information on specific renderer details and installation procedures.

Vision Modalities

In addition to new renderers, we also provide broad support for multiple vision modalities across all (Mujoco, NVISII, iGibson) renderers:

• RGB: Standard 3-channel color frames with values in range [0, 255]. This is set during environment construction with the use_camera_obs argument.
• Depth: 1-channel frame with normalized values in range [0, 1]. This is set during environment construction with the camera_depths argument.
• Segmentation: 1-channel frames with pixel values corresponding to integer IDs for various objects. Segmentation can occur by class, instance, or geom, and is set during environment construction with the camera_segmentations argument.

In addition to the above modalities, the following modalities are supported by a subset of renderers:

• Surface Normals: [NVISII, iGibson] 3-channel (x,y,z) normalized direction vectors.
• Texture Coordinates: [NVISII] 3-channel (x,y,z) coordinate texture mappings for each element
• Texture Positioning: [NVISII, iGibson] 3-channel (x,y,z) global coordinates of each pixel.

Specific modalities can be set during environment and renderer construction. We provide a demo script for testing the different modalities supported by NVISII and a demo script for testing the different modalities supported by iGibson.

Camera Utilities

We provide a set of general-purpose camera utilities that intended to enable easy manipulation of environment cameras. Of note, we include transform utilities for mapping between pixel, camera, and world frames, and include a CameraMover class for dynamically moving a camera during simulation, which can be used for many purposes such as the DemoPlaybackCameraMover subclass that enables smooth visualization during demonstration playback.

Improvements

The following briefly describes other changes that improve on the pre-existing structure. This is not an exhaustive list, but a highlighted list of changes.

• Standardize EEF frames (#204). Now, all grippers have identical conventions for plug-and-play usage across types.

• Add OSC_POSITION control option for spacemouse (#209).

• Improve model class hierarchy for robots. Now, robots own a subset of models (gripper(s), mount(s), etc.), allowing easy external access to the robot's internal model hierarchy.

• robosuite docs updated

• Add new papers

Critical Bug Fixes

• Fix OSC global orientation limits (#228)

Other Bug Fixes

• Fix default OSC orientation control (valid default rotation matrix) (#232)

• Fix Jaco self-collisions (#235)

• Fix joint velocity controller clipping and tune default kp (#236)

Contributor Spotlight

A big thank you to the following community members for spearheading the renderer PRs for this release!
@awesome-aj0123
@divyanshj16
@fxia22