Workstation Installation#

Follow the Omniverse Isaac Sim documentation to install the desired Isaac Sim release.

Set the following environment variables to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc files:

# Isaac Sim root directory
export ISAACSIM_PATH="${HOME}/.local/share/ov/pkg/isaac_sim-*"

where * corresponds to the Isaac Sim version. Remember to run source ~/.bashrc before you proceed.

Although Isaac Sim comes with a built-in Python environment, we recommend using a seperate conda environment which is more flexible. We provide scripts to automate environment setup when activating/deactivating a conda environment at OmniDrones/conda_setup.

See also

Managing Conda Environments .

conda create -n sim python=3.7
conda activate sim

# at OmniDrones/
cp -r conda_setup/etc $CONDA_PREFIX
# re-activate the environment
conda activate sim

# verification
python -c "from omni.isaac.kit import SimulationApp"
# which torch is being used
python -c "import torch; print(torch.__path__)"

The next step is to install TensorDict and TorchRL.

Note

Since TensorDict and TorchRL are still under active development are subject to changes frequently, we recommend installing them by cloning the repositories and installing them in editable mode (via python setup.py develop).

Finally, install OmniDrones in editable mode (which automatically installs other required dependencies):

# at OmniDrones/
pip install -e .

To verify the installation, run

cd scripts
python train.py algo=ppo headless=true wandb.entity=YOUR_WANDB_ENTITY

In general, YOUR_WANDB_ENTITY is your wandb ID. If you don’t want to add arguments every time, edit scripts/train.yaml

Developer Guide: Working with VSCode#

To enable features like linting and auto-completion with VSCode Python Extension, we need to let the extension recognize the extra paths we added during the setup process.

Create a file .vscode/settings.json at your workspace if it is not already there.

After activating the conda environment, run

printenv > .vscode/.python.env

and edit .vscode/settings.json as:

{
    // ...
    "python.envFile": "${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/.python.env",
}