Building Your Own Environments#

robosuite offers great flexibility in creating your own environments. A task typically involves the participation of a robot with grippers as its end-effectors, an arena (workspace), and objects that the robot interacts with. For a detailed overview of our design architecture, please check out the Overview page in Modules. Our Modeling APIs provide methods of composing these modularized elements into a scene, which can be loaded in MuJoCo for simulation. To build your own environments, we recommend you take a look at the Environment classes which have used these APIs to define robotics environments and tasks and the source code of our standardized environments. Below we walk through a step-by-step example of building a new tabletop manipulation environment with our APIs.

Step 1: Creating the world. All mujoco object definitions are housed in an xml. We create a MujocoWorldBase class to do it.

from robosuite.models import MujocoWorldBase

world = MujocoWorldBase()

Step 2: Creating the robot. The class housing the xml of a robot can be created as follows.

from robosuite.models.robots import Panda

mujoco_robot = Panda()

We can add a gripper to the robot by creating a gripper instance and calling the add_gripper method on a robot.

from robosuite.models.grippers import gripper_factory

gripper = gripper_factory('PandaGripper')
mujoco_robot.add_gripper(gripper)

To add the robot to the world, we place the robot on to a desired position and merge it into the world

mujoco_robot.set_base_xpos([0, 0, 0])
world.merge(mujoco_robot)

Step 3: Creating the table. We can initialize the TableArena instance that creates a table and the floorplane

from robosuite.models.arenas import TableArena

mujoco_arena = TableArena()
mujoco_arena.set_origin([0.8, 0, 0])
world.merge(mujoco_arena)

Step 4: Adding the object. For details of MujocoObject, refer to the documentation about MujocoObject, we can create a ball and add it to the world.

from robosuite.models.objects import BallObject
from robosuite.utils.mjcf_utils import new_joint

sphere = BallObject(
    name="sphere",
    size=[0.04],
    rgba=[0, 0.5, 0.5, 1]).get_obj()
sphere.set('pos', '1.0 0 1.0')
world.worldbody.append(sphere)

Step 5: Running Simulation. Once we have created the object, we can obtain a mujoco_py model by running

model = world.get_model(mode="mujoco")

This is an MjModel instance that can then be used for simulation. For example,

import mujoco

data = mujoco.MjData(model)
while data.time < 1:
    mujoco.mj_step(model, data)