RoboRAN: A Unified Robotics Framework for Reinforcement Learning-Based Autonomous Navigation

TL;DR

RoboRAN is a comprehensive, open-source framework that enables training, evaluating, and deploying reinforcement learning-based navigation policies across diverse robotic platforms and environments, promoting generalization and reproducibility.

Contribution

The paper introduces a scalable, modular framework for multi-domain RL navigation, including real-world transfer, an open API, and standardized evaluation metrics.

Findings

Successful sim-to-real transfer across multiple robot types

Unified evaluation metrics for diverse environments

Open-source release facilitates community adoption

Abstract

Autonomous robots must navigate and operate in diverse environments, from terrestrial and aquatic settings to aerial and space domains. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in training policies for specific autonomous robots, existing frameworks and benchmarks are often constrained to unique platforms, limiting generalization and fair comparisons across different mobility systems. In this paper, we present a multi-domain framework for training, evaluating and deploying RL-based navigation policies across diverse robotic platforms and operational environments. Our work presents four key contributions: (1) a scalable and modular framework, facilitating seamless robot-task interchangeability and reproducible training pipelines; (2) sim-to-real transfer demonstrated through real-world experiments with multiple robots, including a satellite robotic simulator, an unmanned surface vessel, and a wheeled ground vehicle; (3) the release of the first open-source API for deploying Isaac Lab-trained policies to real robots, enabling lightweight inference and rapid field validation; and (4) uniform tasks and metrics for cross-medium evaluation, through a unified evaluation testbed to assess performance of navigation tasks in diverse operational conditions (aquatic, terrestrial and space). By ensuring consistency between simulation and real-world deployment, RoboRAN lowers the barrier to developing adaptable RL-based navigation strategies. Its modular design enables straightforward integration of new robots and tasks through predefined templates, fostering reproducibility and extension to diverse domains. To support the community, we release RoboRAN as open-source.