PyRep: Bringing V-REP to Deep Robot Learning

Abstract

PyRep is a toolkit for robot learning research, built on top of the virtual robotics experimentation platform (V-REP). Through a series of modifications and additions, we have created a tailored version of V-REP built with robot learning in mind. The new PyRep toolkit offers three improvements: (1) a simple and flexible API for robot control and scene manipulation, (2) a new rendering engine, and (3) speed boosts upwards of 10,000x in comparison to the previous Python Remote API. With these improvements, we believe PyRep is the ideal toolkit to facilitate rapid prototyping of learning algorithms in the areas of reinforcement learning, imitation learning, state estimation, mapping, and computer vision.