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Priyanshu is presently in the second year of his Master's program within the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, with specialization in Mechatronic and Robotic Systems. His primary areas of research expertise encompass Aerodynamics and robotics: controls and perception. When not immersed in academic pursuits, he derives enjoyment from playing piano and table tennis, as well as engaging in literary pursuits through book reading. Furthermore, he occasionally indulges in leisurely long drives to unwind.

We present ORBIT, a unified and modular framework for robotics and robot learning, powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It offers a modular design to easily and efficiently create robotic environments with photo-realistic scenes, and fast and accurate rigid and soft body simulation.

With ORBIT, we provide a suite of benchmark tasks of varying difficulty- from single-stage cabinet opening and cloth folding to multi-stage tasks such as room reorganization. The tasks include variations in objects' physical properties and placements, material textures, and scene lighting. To support working with diverse observations and actions spaces, we include various fixed-arm and mobile manipulators with different controller implementations and physics-based sensors. ORBIT allows training reinforcement learning policies and collecting large demonstration datasets from hand-crafted or expert solutions in a matter of minutes by leveraging GPU-based parallelization. In summary, we offer fourteen robot articulations, three different physics-based sensors, twenty learning environments, wrappers to four different learning frameworks and interfaces to help connect to a real robot.

With this framework, we aim to support various research areas, including representation learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and motion planning. We hope it helps establish interdisciplinary collaborations between these communities and its modularity makes it easily extensible for more tasks and applications in the future.

With Orbit, you can use an RL framework of your choice and focus on algorithmic research. With RSL-RL and RL-Games, you can train a policy at upto 100k FPS, while with stable-baselines3, you can train a policy at upto 10k FPS.

Orbit includes out-of-the-box support for various peripheral devices such as keyboard, spacemouse and gamepad. You can use these devices to teleoperate the robot and collect demonstrations for behavior cloning.

Sense-Model-Plan-Act (SMPA) decomposes the complex problem of reasoning and control into sub-components. With Orbit, you can define you can define and evaluate your own hand-crafted state machines and motion generators.

It is possible to connect a physical Franka Emika arm to Orbit using ZeroMQ. The computed joint commands from the framework can be sent to the robot and the robot's state can be read back from the robot.

To match complex actuator dynamics (e.g. delays, friction, etc.), you can easily incorporate different actuator models in the simulation through Orbit. This functionality along with various domain randomization tools facilitate training a policy in simulation and transferring it to the real robot. Here we show a policy trained for legged locomotion in simulation and transferred to the robot, ANYmal-D. The robot uses series elastic actuator (SEA) which has non-linear dissipation and hard-to-model delays. Thus, to bridge the sim-to-real gap we use an MLP-based actuator model in simulation to compensate for the actuator dynamics.

We compare the throughput of environments in Orbit with those in other popular frameworks. We use the same hardware setup for all comparisons, which is a computer with a 16-core AMD Ryzen 5950X, 64 GB RAM, and NVIDIA 3090RTX. We measure the throughput of the environments as the number of frames per second (FPS) that the environment can generate.

Additionally, we benchmark the multi-camera rendering performance in two different scenes: i) a simple scene comprising a robot and a table, and ii) a detailed scene with additional assets and light sources. The performance is evaluated at different resolutions and with different numbers of cameras. In current Isaac Sim, the rendering throughput is limited to the virtual memory available on the GPU. Thus, increasing the number of cameras does not linearly increase the simulation output.

DAVID GREENE, HOST: Not too many students go to college expecting to change someone's life, but that's what happened this fall at Rice University. As part of a series - Joe's Big Idea - NPR's Joe Palca tells us how three engineering students invented a robot arm for a teenage boy that changed his life. In doing so, they may have changed theirs as well.JOE PALCA, BYLINE: This is a story about commitment and persistence, and the reward they can bring. The people in the story include an orthopedic surgeon.DR. GLORIA GOGOLA: Gloria Gogola.PALCA: At Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston. Next, a trio of undergrads.MATTHEW NAJOOMI: My name's Matthew Najoomi.PALCA: He's from Fairfield, Calif., now living in Texas.SERGIO GONZALEZ: My name is Sergio Gonzalez. I'm a bioengineer at Rice University.PALCA: Sergio's from Houston, Texas. And then there's Nimish Mittal. He's not from Texas at all.NIMISH MITTAL: I'm actually from Kansas City.PALCA: And finally, there's a 17-year-old high school senior named Dee Faught. Dee has to use a wheelchair to get around because he has a rare genetic disease.DEE FAUGHT: It's called osteogenesis imperfecta.PALCA: A few years ago, Gloria Gogola began taking care of Dee.GOGOLA: He's got the most severe type of osteogenesis imperfecta that one has and survives birth with.PALCA: Osteogenesis imperfecta is also known as brittle bone disease. The slightest blow can fracture Dee's arm. At 17, his bones are tiny. He's only the size of a 3-year-old. His arms and legs are all twisted up, so he has a hard time doing even the simplest task. He has to ask for help when he wants to turn off the light in his room, or pick up a pencil from his desk.It really bugs Gogola she, herself, can't do more for Dee. But she's a surgeon, and more surgery just won't improve his condition.GOGOLA: And I thought gosh, there's got to be a way to help this guy out with just the basic things, the daily life things.PALCA: And then she thought of something. She'd heard about an unusual freshman course at Rice. Instead of learning from a book, students form teams to find engineering solutions for real-world problems. Maybe the class would form a team to help Dee. Enter our trio of young engineers. Sure, we can help, they said. The team's first step was to meet their client. Here's Nimish.MITTAL: We walked through Shriner's Hospital. One of the nurses led us to this patient room, and we walked in; and right smack dab in the center was Dee; sitting there in his wheelchair, with just a big smile on his face, like waiting to see us.NAJOOMI: It was very surprising, seeing how small he was at 15 years old, at the time.PALCA: That's Matt.NAJOOMI: I guess it was a little bit emotional when we first met him, because we felt bad for him being a teenager. We'd been through that phase, what it's like. And on top of that, he has to deal with brittle bones disease. And we wanted to do as much as we could to relieve that.MITTAL: We kind of had a conversation with Dee. And it was kind of like at that point, we realized, like, Dee is no different than any of the people on our team - me, Sergio or Matt. He is exactly the same as all of us, you know. He likes Xbox. He likes playing video games. He was talking about his high school.PALCA: Now, Dr. Gogola wasn't expecting the students would build anything elaborate.GOGOLA: I was envisioning a very simple, mechanical type of reaching stick.PALCA: And at first, Nimish says, that's what they were planning to make.MITTAL: But when we met Dee, like, we came back to the drawing board, and we were all really excited. And we went from something really simple - we were like, no, we need to do - we need to go all out and build the best thing that we possibly can for him.PALCA: So the team of freshmen decided to make a portable robotic arm that would attach to Dee's wheelchair so he could reach things all around him. At the end of the arm, there would be some kind of gripper Dee could use to pick things up.GOGOLA: When they first started talking a robotic solution versus just a mechanical reacher, and I talked to Dr. Saterbak, the professor, and said, you know, really? They're really going to get that complicated? And she said, they've got great robotics backgrounds - all of them. These are guys that had spent their high school careers competing in robotics. They have the ability. And I said, well, great. In that case, let's go.PALCA: So they got going. Here's Sergio.GONZALEZ: We hit, actually, a ton of roadblocks. At the beginning, we were working on what design we should use for the gripper. Like, would it be like a little scoop thing? Would it be sort of like this claw? Would it, you know, would it be three prongs? Would it be two prongs? Would it maybe look exactly like a hand - and have five digits - that clamps around something?PALCA: In the end, they decided on something that looks like pair of pincers, with flat paddles at the end. There was just one problem: The gripper kept dropping things. And there was a bigger problem. Dr. Gogola says the arm wasn't nearly finished, but the engineering course was ending.GOGOLA: So as the class starting getting to a close, I started getting a little nervous; thinking if we have nothing to deliver, you know, I don't know how the Rice students will react. But they're fairly young themselves. They may just see this as, well, this is the end of our class, time to move on. But here's going to be a kid on the other end, waiting for it. And I thought to myself, this is a little too - too heart-wrenching for me.PALCA: But Matt and Nimish say the idea of not finishing the project never entered their minds.NAJOOMI: We had someone that came and sat down in front of us and asked for our help.MITTAL: We had to finish something for Dee. We couldn't - we couldn't like, honestly leave this project because we would have left Dee hanging.PALCA: So the class ended, and the team kept going. All the rest of their freshman year, through the summer and the next school year, the trio kept at it. Finally, they cracked the gripper problems. Here's Nimish.MITTAL: We changed the materials we used, at the end. We changed the angle at which it was touching the objects. We made it a little bit bigger so there's more contact with the objects that we were picking up.PALCA: At the end of this past September, two years after they first got the assignment, Matt, Sergio and Nimish delivered a working model of the robotic arm to Dee.(SOUNDBITE OF ROBOTIC NOISES)PALCA: They call it the R arm. It extends 6 feet. Matt says they used a video game control panel to make it easy for Dee to operate.NAJOOMI: He can rotate the first joint with the action triangle buttons, and then he can rotate the second joint with the up and down buttons.PALCA: Another set of buttons opens and closes the gripper. When the team handed the arm controller to Dee, he got the hang of it right away.FAUGHT: I picked up a towel, and then I picked up hats, and then I picked up a shirt. And I picked up stuff like a cup, an orange and a book.PALCA: Just normal stuff - boring, really, but not for Dee.FAUGHT: It was actually the coolest thing ever.PALCA: The young engineers expect they'll do more tinkering after Dee uses the arm for a while. For orthopedic surgeon Gloria Gogola, the project was an unqualified success, and she hopes it's just the start.GOGOLA: My hidden agenda in all this is to expose these very able-bodied, very intelligent young engineers to the whole field of assistive devices, and things that can help people that are differently abled get along, and do better in their lives.PALCA: When you hear Sergio, Nimish and Matt talk about their project, it seems like her plan is working.GONZALEZ: This has definitely refined the engineering I want to do because it's an engineering focused on helping people.MITTAL: I definitely want to continue this kind of work throughout my life.NAJOOMI: It's been a lot of sacrifice timewise on our end, but I think it pales in comparison to how rewarding it is seeing him actually use it and smile.PALCA: You can see pictures of Dee and his robotic arm on the shots blog on our website, NPR.org.Joe Palca, NPR News.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)