Home for community environments

[pthangeda]

I imagine the plan is to keep mjlab itself lean - just the core framework + a handful of reference environments to show how things work. But as more people start building their own envs, it might be harder to keep track of them in the README.md.

I think it'd be great to have a shared place to collect and distribute them along with relevant assets. A separate repo (similar to mujoco_menagerie but for envs) where people can contribute tasks. Installing this package and making new envs show up should be trivial thanks to the auto-discovery via entry points that's already in mjlab.

I was thinking mjlab_arena or mjlab_arcade (or any other names people can think of!) I am porting some IsaacLab envs so happy to kick this off/organize it and commit time for maintaining in the future. It'll also make it easy to setup a pipeline for a webpage show-casing all envs similar to IsaacLab: https://isaac-sim.github.io/IsaacLab/main/source/overview/environments.html

Contribution guidelines and process can be similar to how this are done in mujoco_menagerie today.

What do you guys think @kevinzakka @louislelay ?

[kevinzakka]

Hi @pthangeda, I would be happy to create a repo in the mujocolab org and have you maintain it for this purpose. Unfortunately I can't personally commit to helping with this effort at this time but would be happy to unblock you!

[pthangeda]

Thanks @kevinzakka! Lemme start this in a repo in my personal account, and if I am happy with how it looks and the time I spent on it in a week or two I'll come back here and share it to see if we can dicuss moving it to a repo in the mujocolab org. How does that sound?

[asgundogdu]

Hey @pthangeda — +1 to the idea of a community “envs/tasks” repo to keep mjlab itself lean and we started an external repo for manipulation focused envs/tasks. Plan is to add common manipulation tasks + assets (e.g., FR3 + a simple lift/cube-style task) and share once it’s a bit more tested.

we can align with a common structure to contribute/maintain

[louislelay]

Hi @pthangeda, I think it's a nice idea! At one point, I had in mind the Best-Of approach because it makes a rank based on how well maintained/used the projects are but it might be overkilled ahah

An example with robotics simulator : https://github.com/knmcguire/best-of-robot-simulators

[pthangeda]

Ohhh I didn't even know about this repo/best-of-lists! I'll probably feel bad assigning lower scores to someone's env/project just because it doesn't have a lot of recent stars or activity lol 😅

[kevinzakka]

Had an incentive to release some tasks from MuJoCo Playground, so I put them here: https://github.com/mujocolab/mjlab_playground

Maybe this can be a good place to host high quality community-contributed tasks.