Wheeled Lab: Modern Sim2Real for Low-cost, Open-source Wheeled Robotics

TL;DR

Wheeled Lab introduces an accessible, open-source ecosystem combining hardware and simulation to facilitate robotics research and education, demonstrating state-of-the-art zero-shot policies on small RC cars.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, low-cost open-source platform integrating hardware and simulation for robotics, enabling broader community engagement and research.

Findings

Demonstrated zero-shot policies for drifting, elevation traversal, and visual navigation.

Provided an open-source, low-cost hardware and software stack for robotics.

Facilitated research and education through accessible tools and resources.

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been pivotal in recent robotics milestones and is poised to play a prominent role in the future. However, these advances can rely on proprietary simulators, expensive hardware, and a daunting range of tools and skills. As a result, broader communities are disconnecting from the state-of-the-art; education curricula are poorly equipped to teach indispensable modern robotics skills involving hardware, deployment, and iterative development. To address this gap between the broader and scientific communities, we contribute Wheeled Lab, an ecosystem which integrates accessible, open-source wheeled robots with Isaac Lab, an open-source robot learning and simulation framework, that is widely adopted in the state-of-the-art. To kickstart research and education, this work demonstrates three state-of-the-art zero-shot policies for small-scale RC cars developed through Wheeled Lab: controlled drifting, elevation traversal, and visual navigation. The full stack, from hardware to software, is low-cost and open-source. Videos and additional materials can be found at: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/WheeledLab/