CODEWITHSUNDEEP
robolectricrosgoogle-colaboratoryreinforcement-learningopenai-gym
Tal
Tal

Reputation: 1215

Run gym-gazebo on Google Colaboratory

I am trying to run gym-gazebo on Google Colaboratory.
There is a problem to run gazebo server (gazebo without gui) on Colab.
There was warning on display: Unable to create X window. Rendering will be disabled but I think I fix it.
There also warning about sound card. not sure it related Unable to open audio device,
And there warning about conversion Conversion of sensor type[depth] not supported
Here is an example
Can you help?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 9442

Answers (1)

Anton Matosov
Anton Matosov

Reputation: 1705

In order to run gazebo in a headless mode you need to run gserver executable, instead of gazebo. Not sure which one is used by the gym-gazebo toolkit.

In order to still do rendering in gazebo server (e.g. camera view) you would need to use Xvfb (X Virtual Frame Buffer). It is an X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices. It emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

For your specific colab notebook I have changed last cell by adding 

get_ipython().system_raw('Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1600x1200x16  &')

in order to create virtual display and added DISPLAY=:1.0 to the beginning of the last line, so it looked as follows

DISPLAY=:1.0 python gym-gazebo/examples/turtlebot/circuit2c_turtlebot_camera_dqn.py

DISPLAY=:1.0 tells X Window client used by gazebo to use virtual display we have created instead of default one :0.

A complete installation of Gazebo on colab and running it in headless server mode with rendering capability can be achieved the following way:

!curl -sSL http://get.gazebosim.org | sh # Install gazebo

!apt-get install -y xvfb # Install X Virtual Frame Buffer

get_ipython().system_raw('Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1600x1200x16  &') # create virtual display with size 1600x1200 and 16 bit color. Color can be changed to 24 or 8

!source /usr/share/gazebo-9/setup.sh && DISPLAY=:1.0 gzserver --verbose # Run gazebo and tell X client to use our virtual DISPLAY :1.0

There is also a way to run full gazebo in simulator with gzweb as a head and link to it using ngrok.io explained here as a fully working notebook. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1A-miW8cTRKzs7B0m1m4enfiFySzBhsgN

You would need to authenticate to ngrok using your auth token which can be created at ngrok.com in order to connect, because it is lunch as background and doesn't print to cell

 !./ngrok authtoken <token>

Upvotes: 0

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