Open source, browser-based, javascript, webgl, and can even control an Arduino version of your robot (via node); I'm not sure why it's such an underdog, but I suspect it's partially the name.
Good. Dynamic datasets for next gen AI. I think simulation is going to be essential for the AI of the future: physical 3D simulation, game simulation (like AlphaGo, which run MCMC) and ultimately, complex scene with multiple human and non-human agents (self driving cars, robots, chat bots). The era of ImageNet and static data is over.
"This policy itself is still a multilayer perceptron, which has no internal state, so we believe that in some cases the agent uses its arms to store information." - That's a pretty surprising result to me!
"However, a policy that succeeds in simulation often doesn't work when deployed on a real robot. Nevertheless, often the overall gist of what the policy does in simulation remains valid in the real world. In this paper we investigate such settings, where the sequence of states traversed in simulation remains reasonable for the real world, even if the details of the controls are not, as could be the case when the key differences lie in detailed friction, contact, mass and geometry properties"
from Transfer from Simulation to Real World through Learning Deep Inverse Dynamics Model
Well, yes, but getting robots to move without falling over is not really a core AI topic; it's an application area where some AI stuff happens to be useful.
Coming from a site with a name like "Open AI" I expected some software to help promote research on workhorse AI topics such as search, planning, constraint programming, knowledge representation and automated reasoning.
Robotics is not a core problem for AI. It's not even a core problem for Comp Sci. There's a whole bunch of kinematics and dynamics at play which are completely besides the point for most AI people. The only thing (some) AI folks care about is the control problems that arise in Robotics but the development of suitable methods to solve these comprises, I would argue, a rather small and not representative part of the field.
Robotics has always been at the center of the AI vision, for academics and in culture.
There's a movie called 'AI'. It's not about automatic labelling of YouTube videos or 2-sat.
Planning and reasoning more your kind of AI? Seminal AI tech STRIPS and A* were invented to drive Shakey the robot. Shakey also had very early computer vision.
Hardly anyone would claim that self-driving cars - robots with people inside - are not AI, and a pretty compelling bit of AI right now.
Please pay attention: Robotics is just one application area for AI. Core problems from Robotics may influence the field of AI but they don't define it. Gait control or vision are or what have you are only interesting for AI people insofar as they can be used to study automated reasoning. The core problems of AI are the same as those of Computer Science: search, sort and computability.
This is cool. I've been working on a quadrupedal robot. I wonder if some of these tools would help me visualize and develop gaits for the robot? It looks like they would.
You could also try out pybullet, the official Python bindings for Bullet Physics which uses the same underpinnings as Roboschool: pip install pybullet and you are up and running, quickstart guide is at http://pybullet.org. It has a Minitaur quadruped robot as one of the examples.
Huge news, waiting for open source robot simulator for long. It's so wonderful.
However, the shadow and appearance are a little pale compared to MuJoCo.
This looks AMAZING. 3D games will eventually use deep learning controllers on fully simulated physical forms, instead of animations. The future is going to be amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa__wkSmWUw