Search — isaac-lab

A Hacker News item titled “Isaac Newton on Laputa” appears under an Isaac Lab feed but provides no actionable product feedback in the content captured.

TacSL force-field readings in an Isaac Lab demo do not increase smoothly with stepped applied normal force and instead appear irregular. The user reports Isaac Lab main branch with Isaac Sim 5.1.

A dexterous hand imported via URDF fails to grasp and lift a bottle; the object slides and remains unliftable. The same bottle can be lifted using a Franka example, suggesting contact/friction or grasp modeling differences for the hand.

A dexterous hand imported via URDF cannot grasp a bottle reliably; the bottle slides and cannot be lifted. The reporter notes the Franka example can lift the same object, implying a hand-specific contact/friction issue.

Relative texture paths do not work in the IsaacLab Beta according to the report, even when the image is in the same folder as the USD. Loading via IsaacLab code triggers errors.

Isaac Sim 4.5 GUI crashes with errors when running IsaacLab examples. This blocks users from executing standard example pipelines.

Proposal to integrate DiffRL into IsaacLab via an isaaclab_diffrl extension and the Mineral algorithm library. It targets the Direct workflow and Newton (Warp) backend to enable end-to-end backprop through physics for algorithms like SHAC and APG/BPTT.

In a CloudXR + OpenXR setup, frames stream correctly but inbound messages and hand-tracking poses are silently dropped between client and Isaac Sim’s OpenXR plugin. This blocks teleop commands and hand tracking for interactive workflows.

In Isaac Lab v3.0.0-beta, lift_cube_sm.py ignores the --viz kit option and no Kit/Isaac Sim window opens despite the process running. A one-line change to AppLauncher initialization appears to fix it locally.

Learning robust navigation policies remains a core challenge in robotics. Offline imitation learning suffers from distribution shift and compounding errors at rollout, while reinforcement learning requires reward engineering and learns inefficiently. In this paper, we propose NavOL, an online imitation learning paradigm that interacts with a simulator and updates itself using expert demonstrations gathered online. Built upon a pretrained navigation diffusion policy that maps local observations to future waypoints, NavOL trains in a rollout update loop: during rollout, the policy acts in the simulator and queries a global planner which has privileged access to the global environment for the optimal path segment as ground truth trajectory labels; during update, the policy is trained on the online collected observation trajectory pairs. This online imitation loop removes the need for reward design, improves learning efficiency, and mitigates distribution shift by training on the policy own explored rollouts. Built on IsaacLab with fast, high-fidelity parallel rendering and domain randomization of camera pose and start-goal pairs, our system scales across 50 scenes on 8 RTX 4090 GPUs, collecting over 2,000 new trajectories per hour, each averaging more than 400 steps. We also introduce an indoor visual navigation benchmark with predefined start and goal positions for zero-shot generalization. Extensive evaluations on simulation benchmarks, including the NavDP benchmark and our proposed benchmark, as well as carefully designed real-world experiments, demonstrate the effectiveness of NavOL, showing consistent performance gains in online imitation learning.

Autonomous-driving simulators typically trade physical fidelity for scalable parallelism. Physics-based platforms such as CARLA and MetaDrive provide articulated vehicle dynamics and contact, but their non-vectorized interfaces make batched training difficult. GPU-batched systems such as Waymax and GPUDrive scale to hundreds of scenarios by replacing rigid-body physics with simplified kinematic models, omitting tire--road interaction, suspension, contact dynamics, and road-condition-dependent friction. We introduce SceneFactory, a GPU-vectorized platform for procedural scene construction, physics-based multi-agent simulation, and RL in autonomous-driving environments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim + Isaac Lab, SceneFactory represents worlds and agents as batched tensors: control, observations, rewards, resets, and policy inference run as GPU tensor operations over the Isaac Lab tensor API. SceneFactory converts Waymo Open Motion Dataset road topologies into simulation-ready USD worlds, runs many worlds concurrently on one GPU, populates each with multiple articulated PhysX vehicles, and maps precipitation and road-surface type to PhysX material friction coefficients. With GPU vectorization, SceneFactory achieves up to 127$\times$ higher throughput than a non-vectorized PhysX baseline on the same GPU and physics solver, reaching 19,250 controlled-agent simulation steps per second at 256 worlds $\times$ 16 agents. Cross-simulator transfer reveals an asymmetric dynamics gap: physics-grounded RL policies transfer to a simplified kinematic bicycle model with 99.5% success, whereas reverse transfer drops to 47.3%. Under wet-road friction, friction-aware policies reduce mean peak DRAC from 58.7 to 27.8,m/s$^2$ without sacrificing goal reach. SceneFactory shows that scalable autonomous-driving training need not discard articulated rigid-body dynamics or physically grounded road-condition variation.