OmniLRS: A Photorealistic Simulator for Lunar Robotics

TL;DR

OmniLRS is a photorealistic lunar robot simulator based on Nvidia's Isaac Sim, enabling fast environment generation, multi-robot control, and effective synthetic data for machine learning, bridging the gap between simulation and real-world lunar exploration.

Contribution

The paper introduces OmniLRS, a novel photorealistic lunar simulation platform with ROS integration and synthetic data pipelines, enhancing lunar robotic algorithm development and perception tasks.

Findings

Synthetic data trained models nearly match real-world data performance.

Finetuning with real data improves model precision by 14%.

The simulator is open-source and demonstrated effective for perception tasks.

Abstract

Developing algorithms for extra-terrestrial robotic exploration has always been challenging. Along with the complexity associated with these environments, one of the main issues remains the evaluation of said algorithms. With the regained interest in lunar exploration, there is also a demand for quality simulators that will enable the development of lunar robots. % In this paper, we explain how we built a Lunar simulator based on Isaac Sim, Nvidia's robotic simulator. In this paper, we propose Omniverse Lunar Robotic-Sim (OmniLRS) that is a photorealistic Lunar simulator based on Nvidia's robotic simulator. This simulation provides fast procedural environment generation, multi-robot capabilities, along with synthetic data pipeline for machine-learning applications. It comes with ROS1 and ROS2 bindings to control not only the robots, but also the environments. This work also performs sim-to-real rock instance segmentation to show the effectiveness of our simulator for image-based perception. Trained on our synthetic data, a yolov8 model achieves performance close to a model trained on real-world data, with 5% performance gap. When finetuned with real data, the model achieves 14% higher average precision than the model trained on real-world data, demonstrating our simulator's photorealism.% to realize sim-to-real. The code is fully open-source, accessible here: https://github.com/AntoineRichard/LunarSim, and comes with demonstrations.