Improvement Idea: Trigger multiple simulation steps at once

[Phlogiston90]

Hi Stephen,

in my particular RL problem, I want to simulate 20 simulation steps before the agent observes the new state, because it drops something and has to see where it lands, which takes longer than 1 simulation step. Increasing the simulation time delta by 20 times obviously doesn't work as this will not consider collisions that might happen in between.
I could imagine that I would not be the only one that has a setting like this.

Sending 20 times PyRep.step() is slow (~210ms in my scene), which is the same time as sending 20 times vrep.simxSynchronousTrigger() in the original VREP python API.
I was able to speed this up by a factor of ~20 times by writing a customization script that executes 20 simulation steps at one call as suggested in http://www.forum.coppeliarobotics.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7926 .
One would have to write a customization script containing

function sysCall_init()
    stepsToRun=0
end

function start20StepRun()
    stepsToRun=20
end

function sysCall_beforeMainScript()
    return {doNotRunMainScript=(stepsToRun==0)}
end

function sysCall_actuation()
    stepsToRun=stepsToRun-1
end

and then don't use the synchronous mode in VREP.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with PyRep anymore, and I was wondering if you could add this functionality directly into it, e.g. that PyRep.step() accepts the number of steps as a parameter. This would be an awesome functionality and another bonus for PyRep!

Best,
Mark

[stepjam]

I've looked in to this more and I think I have a plan. I'll have to make the modifications to the V-REP source, so it will take some time before this feature becomes available (in the next public revision of V-REP).

[Phlogiston90]

That's awesome!!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.