PyRobot: An Open-source Robotics Framework for Research and Benchmarking
This work addresses the problem of accessibility for researchers in fields like machine learning and computer vision by providing a light-weight framework to democratize robotics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing systems like ROS.
The paper tackles the problem of high entry barriers in robotics research by introducing PyRobot, an open-source framework that provides hardware-independent APIs and a research ecosystem, resulting in a tool that allows non-robotics researchers to focus on AI applications and quickly create state-of-the-art baselines.
This paper introduces PyRobot, an open-source robotics framework for research and benchmarking. PyRobot is a light-weight, high-level interface on top of ROS that provides a consistent set of hardware independent mid-level APIs to control different robots. PyRobot abstracts away details about low-level controllers and inter-process communication, and allows non-robotics researchers (ML, CV researchers) to focus on building high-level AI applications. PyRobot aims to provide a research ecosystem with convenient access to robotics datasets, algorithm implementations and models that can be used to quickly create a state-of-the-art baseline. We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics. PyRobot is open-source, and can be accessed via https://pyrobot.org.