Brax v2 preview is out!

[btaba]

Hi folks, we have released a Brax v2 preview here.

Some highlights from the release notes:

• Generalized physics backend.
• Continued support for the Spring physics backends. PBD will soon follow.
• Direct support for Mujoco XML format, and URDF by association.
• Fully traceable System object.
• Env API that better supports custom physics backends.
• Open sourced visualizer server.

Be sure to check out the training notebook as well.

For folks who want to pin v1 brax, you can use v0.0.16. Stay tuned for a major release of brax v2.

[ManuCorrea]

Hello @btaba,

I would like to contribute to the project, is there any issue/item that can be addressed from the community? I also saw the only issue with good first issue is this one #66, does this still relevant? Could any other issues be suitable as good first one?

[btaba]

Hi @ManuCorrea ! We haven't been great about managing tags, we'll try to be a bit better going forward. Here are a couple of suggestions of things you could look into:

• TPU training colab is not working for me #224
• loading textures from mujoco and piping them to the visualizer, pointers: 1, 2
• sphere or capsule <> heightmap collisions

@cdfreeman-google @erikfrey any other ideas?

[ManuCorrea]

@btaba I have been trying to enhance the JS GUI but it hasn't been possible to me.

viewer.js gets imported from https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/google/[email protected]/brax/v2/visualizer/js/viewer.js so local changes don't apply.

I have been trying several ways of importing it, relatives imports from index.html, hardcoded path in index and in the render (html.py) functions but I haven't found the way.

Which is the proper way to develop for the front-end part locally?

Sorry if there is some obvious way to it but I have spend quite some try just trying to get it running instead of coding the feature.

Thank you in advance.

[btaba]

Hi @ManuCorrea ! You can run the visualizer server python3 brax/v2/visualizer/visualizer.py to develop locally! We have a couple of missing deps in setup.py that we'll have added

[ManuCorrea]

It was kinda obvious but didn't notice it existed! Thank you a lot :) I also added the missing deps on setup, assuming this is a main tool not just a develop tool

[moskomule]

Hi @btaba! When do you plan to make the next major release (v2) public? I would like to know the (approximated) timeline.

[btaba]

Hi @moskomule ! We are implementing the pbd backend and all the same environments as in v1 (and resolving issues thereof). It's hard to pin down an exact date but we are on the tail end of getting v2 out

[Theo-Cheynel]

@moskomule v2 is out apparently 🎉

[bayerj]

Hey,

I was looking through the code to see if I could build my own simple environment to play with the traceable system state. Currently, only the Ant env seems to have been ported, which is rather complicated. It would be really nice to have something radically simple, for example the reacher, to play with that.

Thanks for the great work!

[btaba]

Hi @bayerj we just pushed several more envs, including reacher!

[kallel-mahdi]

Hi @btaba do you have an (approximate) idea when the Swimmer environment will be available in the v2 release? Many thanks!

[btaba]

Hi @kallel-mahdi , I don't think we'll be adding swimmer, but if you'd like to add that please feel free! We'll be moving v2 to the mainline very shortly O(days)

[btaba]

Quick update, we've moved brax v2 to the main folder in v0.9.0. brax.v1 is available if folks still want to use it but it's being deprecated. We will bump to a major 1.0.0 release once we hash out a few last bits!

[yardenas]

Hi!
I'd also like to contribute, any “good-first-issues” I can start working on?

Cheers 🚀