Adding Third Party Controllers

To use a third-party controller with robosuite, you’ll need to:

1. Create a new class that subclasses one of the composite controllers in robosuite/controllers/composite/composite_controller.py.

2. Register the composite controller with the decorator @register_composite_controller.

3. Implement composite specific functionality that ultimately provides control input to the underlying part_controller’s.

4. Import the new class so that it gets added to robosuite’s REGISTERED_COMPOSITE_CONTROLLERS_DICT via the @register_composite_controller decorator.

5. Provide controller specific configs and the new controller’s type in a json file.

For the new composite controllers subclassing WholeBody, you’ll mainly need to update joint_action_policy.

We provide an example of how to use a third-party WholeBodyMinkIK composite controller with robosuite, in the robosuite/examples/third_party_controller/ directory. You can run the command python teleop_mink.py example script to see a third-party controller in action. Note: to run this specific example, you’ll need to pip install mink.

Steps 1 and 2:

In robosuite/examples/third_party_controller/mink_controller.py:

@register_composite_controller
class WholeBodyMinkIK(WholeBody):
    name = "WHOLE_BODY_MINK_IK"

Step 3:

In robosuite/examples/third_party_controller/mink_controller.py, add logic specific to the new composite controller:

self.joint_action_policy = IKSolverMink(...)

Step 4:

In teleop_mink.py, we import:

from robosuite.examples.third_party_controller.mink_controller import WholeBodyMinkIK

Step 5:

In robosuite/examples/third_party_controller/default_mink_ik_gr1.json, we add configs specific to our new composite controller. and also set the type to match the name specified in WholeBodyMinkIK:

{
    "type": "WHOLE_BODY_MINK_IK",  # set the correct type
    "composite_controller_specific_configs": {
            ...
    },
    ...
}