Mujoco License

[laksefest]

Why cant OpenAI/GYM use something free? There are no other free physics engine that can be used? Im not a student and I dont have 500$ to pay for Mujoco every year. This is such a disappointment.

[lukashermann]

For some environments, there is a free alternative: https://blog.openai.com/roboschool/

[erwincoumans]

You can also use pybullet Gym environments that we are developing at Google Brain, it has environments like Ant, Humanoid, Hopper etc, but also new ones like Minitaur, Racecar and KukaGrasp. Unlike Roboschool and MuJoCo, pybullet installation is very simple: pip install pybullet and it works well on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

The user manual is here: http://pybullet.org there is a section under development about Reinforcement Learning.

Here is a video of the pybullet Ant (modeled and compatible with Roboschool Ant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmCH-i9Vfw4

Another video one for Minitaur, trained using TensorFlow Agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmsUE4N6QP8

KUKA Grasping, trained using OpenAI Baselines DQN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzmcRT5rc3c

Racecar, both discrete and continuous (either Baselines DQN, or Agents PPO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ5Px-ocelw

Our plan is to support all Gym MuJoCo and Roboschool environment, there is this issue to track if you are interested.

[jtoy]

as @erwincoumans mentioned, If you have the flexibility, you could use bullet/pybullet. I had the same issue and moved my experiments to pybullet without hassle. Moving had the benefit of making environment setup/deployment much easier for me as well.

[mariusa]

OpenAI staff, would you please make pybullet implementation the default one? It would ease adoption by new users.

Please see https://github.com/benelot/pybullet-gym

and also https://github.com/openai/gym/issues/956

[josiahls]

Like seriously, if you have a project with the word "open" and then use a proprietary backend, what's the point in calling yourself open? I have spent the past few trying to get the environment installed on a job based server, but in the end, if you have a license tied to an id, and the job lands on a different node, then you're screwed anyways.

[gandalf1819]

How many days does it take for the license to get approved if you apply for a student license?

[kargarisaac]

@gandalf1819 It seems it will take forever. they don't answer emails

[christopherhesse]

Roboschool and Pybullet are now mentioned on the environments page: https://github.com/openai/gym/blob/master/docs/environments.md

@erwincoumans let me know if there's a better link for the description for Pybullet, the google docs user manual was the only reference I could find for what environments were available.

I think we're unlikely to just replace the mujoco environments because they serve as reference points for papers, but either Roboschool or Pybullet offer license-free 3d physics environments, so people should generally prefer those if they don't need mujoco.

[christopherhesse]

Closing this issue as I think roboschool and pybullet serve this purpose well.