Paper ID: 2209.00274

mc-mujoco: Simulating Articulated Robots with FSM Controllers in MuJoCo

Rohan P. Singh, Pierre Gergondet, Fumio Kanehiro

For safe and reliable deployment of any robot controller on the real hardware platform, it is generally a necessary practice to comprehensively assess the performance of the controller with the specific robot in a realistic simulation environment beforehand. While there exist several software solutions that can provide the core physics engine for this purpose, it is often a cumbersome and error-prone effort to interface the simulation environment with the robot controller being evaluated. The controller may have a complex structure consisting of multiple states and transitions within a finite-state machine (FSM), and may even require input through a GUI. In this work, we present mc-mujoco -- an open-source software framework that forms an interface between the MuJoCo physics simulator and the mc-rtc robot control framework. We provide implementation details and describe the process for adding support for essentially any new robot. We also demonstrate and publish a sample FSM controller for bipedal locomotion and stable grasping of a rigid object by the HRP-5P humanoid robot in MuJoCo. The code and usage instructions for mc-mujoco, the developed robot modules, and the FSM controller are available online.

Submitted: Sep 1, 2022