Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning

Part of Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks 1 (NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021) round2

Bibtex Paper Reviews And Public Comment » Supplemental

Authors

Viktor Makoviychuk, Lukasz Wawrzyniak, Yunrong Guo, Michelle Lu, Kier Storey, Miles Macklin, David Hoeller, Nikita Rudin, Arthur Allshire, Ankur Handa, Gavriel State

Abstract

Isaac Gym offers a high-performance learning platform to train policies for a wide variety of robotics tasks entirely on GPU. Both physics simulation and neural network policy training reside on GPU and communicate by directly passing data from physics buffers to PyTorch tensors without ever going through CPU bottlenecks. This leads to blazing fast training times for complex robotics tasks on a single GPU with 2-3 orders of magnitude improvements compared to conventional RL training that uses a CPU-based simulator and GPUs for neural networks. We host the results and videos at https://sites.google.com/view/isaacgym-nvidia and Isaac Gym can be downloaded at https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-gym. The benchmark and environments are available at https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/IsaacGymEnvs.