Brax - A Differentiable Physics Engine for Large Scale Rigid Body Simulation

Part of Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks 1 (NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021) round1

Bibtex Paper Reviews And Public Comment » Supplemental

Authors

Daniel Freeman, Erik Frey, Anton Raichuk, Sertan Girgin, Igor Mordatch, Olivier Bachem

Abstract

We present Brax, an open source library for \textbf{r}igid \textbf{b}ody simulation with a focus on performance and parallelism on accelerators, written in JAX. We present results on a suite of tasks inspired by the existing reinforcement learning literature, but remade in our engine. Additionally, we provide reimplementations of PPO, SAC, ES, and direct policy optimization in JAX that compile alongside our environments, allowing the learning algorithm and the environment processing to occur on the same device, and to scale seamlessly on accelerators. Finally, we include notebooks that facilitate training of performant policies on common MuJoCo-like tasks in minutes.