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EAGER

Discontinued. Please check-out EAGERx.

Engine Agnostic Gym Environment for Robotics (EAGER) is a toolkit that will allow users to apply (deep) reinforcement learning for both simulated and real robots as well as combinations thereof. The toolkit serves as bridge between the popular reinforcement learning toolkit OpenAI Gym and robots that can either be real or simulated. The EAGER toolkit makes use of the widely used ROS framework for communication. Nonetheless, thanks to the flexible design of the toolkit, it is possible for users to create a customized bridge for robots without ROS support.

Key Functionalities and Features

Functionality/Feature EAGER
User-friendly creation of Gym environments for robot control tasks. ✔️
PyBullet integration ✔️
Webots integration ✔️
Gazebo integration ✔️
Preprocessing of actions ✔️
Switching between and/or combining physics engines ✔️
Documentation ✔️

Planned Functionalities and Features

We are currently working on the following features and functionalities:

  • Guaranteed synchronization of actions and observations in simulators
  • Demos
  • Increasing the number of supported robots and sensors
  • Preprocessing of observations
  • Adding reset procedures
  • More efficient communcation protocol

Documentation

Documentation is available online: https://eager-control.readthedocs.io

Installation

At this time no stable version has been released yet, only a bleeding-edge version is available.

Bleeding-edge version

Prerequisites: EAGER requires ROS Melodic or Noetic and Python 3.6+ to be installed.

NOTE Running in ROS Melodic is supported but may cause issues in some cases. Make sure you have installed all modules needed to run ROS on Python 3.

In Melodic, the gym environment side of EAGER will need to be run in Python 3 but the physics bridge side can be run in both Python 2 or Python 3. This should allow users to run robotics hardware that does not support Noetic and Python 3.

We provide two ways to install the bleeding-edge version, i.e. (1) cloning the repository into a catkin workspace and (2) installation with pip.

(1) Cloning the repository into a catkin workspace

If you do not have a ROS workspace yet create one:

  mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
  cd catkin_ws/src

Clone the eager repository into the src folder:

  git clone https://github.com/eager-dev/eager.git

NOTE At this time two requirements to run the UR5e cannot be retreived using rosdep. Please clone these into the src folder using the following commands:

  git clone -b melodic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot.git
  git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/ur_modern_driver.git

Move to your workspace folder and run rosdep to install any requirements:

cd ..
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Then build and source the packages:

catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

(2) Install using pip

This also provides the possibility to perform a custom installation rather than full installation with all EAGER packages. This can done via HTTPS or SSH.

  • Using HTTPS, run:
pip install git+https://github.com/eager-dev/eager
  • Using SSH, run:
pip install git+ssh://[email protected]/eager-dev/eager.git

Now install EAGER by running:

install_eager

The bash script install_eager will clone the repository and create a catkin workspace at desired locations. It also asks for input in order to create links to the desired packages in this workspace. Afterwards, it will build the workspace. In order to use EAGER, the only thing that is required is sourcing:

source [EAGER_WORKSPACE_LOCATION]/devel/setup.bash

It is possible to run install_eager multiple times in order to install additional packages later.

Example

In this example we create a Webots environment with a single UR5e robot. Once started we step the environment with random actions from the action space and then close the environment.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import rospy
from eager_core.eager_env import EagerEnv
from eager_core.objects import Object
from eager_bridge_webots.webots_engine import WebotsEngine


if __name__ == '__main__':

    rospy.init_node('ur5e_example')

    engine = WebotsEngine()

    ur5e_robot = Object.create('robot1', 'eager_robot_ur5e', 'ur5e')
    env = EagerEnv(engine, objects=[ur5e_robot])

    for _ in range(1000):
        env.step(env.action_space.sample())

    env.close()

Implemented Objects

The following objects are currently implemented in EAGER. We are currently working on extending the number of supported objects.

Object Type PyBullet Webots Gazebo Real-World
UR5e Robot ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Panda Robot ✔️ ❌ ❌ ❌
MultiSense S21 Sensor ✔️ ✔️ ❌ ❌
Can Solid ❌ ✔️ ❌ ❌

Citing the Project

To cite this repository in publications:

@misc{eager-control,
  author = {Van der Heijden, Bas and Keijzer, Alexander and Luijkx, Jelle},
  title = {EAGER: Engine Agnostic Gym Environment for Robotics},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/eager-dev/eager}},
}

Maintainers

EAGER is currently maintained by Bas van der Heijden (@bheijden), Alexander Keijzer (@AlexanderKeijzer) and Jelle Luijkx (@jelledouwe).

Acknowledgments

EAGER is funded by the OpenDR Horizon 2020 project.

Troubleshooting

Webots

  • Make sure WEBOTS_HOME is defined
  • Make sure every robot to be controlled has 'ros' as its controller with flags '--synchronize' and 'name=NAME' where NAME is the name of the robot in you EAGER environment
  • Make sure at least one robot has the supervisor flag set to true