Half Cheetah#
This environment is part of the Mujoco environments. Please read that page first for general information.
Action Space |
Box(-1.0, 1.0, (6,), float32) |
Observation Shape |
(17,) |
Observation High |
[inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf inf] |
Observation Low |
[-inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf -inf] |
Import |
|
Description#
This environment is based on the work by P. Wawrzy´nski in “A Cat-Like Robot Real-Time Learning to Run”. The HalfCheetah is a 2-dimensional robot consisting of 9 links and 8 joints connecting them (including two paws). The goal is to apply a torque on the joints to make the cheetah run forward (right) as fast as possible, with a positive reward allocated based on the distance moved forward and a negative reward allocated for moving backward. The torso and head of the cheetah are fixed, and the torque can only be applied on the other 6 joints over the front and back thighs (connecting to the torso), shins (connecting to the thighs) and feet (connecting to the shins).
Action Space#
The action space is a Box(-1, 1, (6,), float32)
. An action represents the torques applied between links.
Num |
Action |
Control Min |
Control Max |
Name (in corresponding XML file) |
Joint |
Unit |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0 |
Torque applied on the back thigh rotor |
-1 |
1 |
bthigh |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
1 |
Torque applied on the back shin rotor |
-1 |
1 |
bshin |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
2 |
Torque applied on the back foot rotor |
-1 |
1 |
bfoot |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
3 |
Torque applied on the front thigh rotor |
-1 |
1 |
fthigh |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
4 |
Torque applied on the front shin rotor |
-1 |
1 |
fshin |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
5 |
Torque applied on the front foot rotor |
-1 |
1 |
ffoot |
hinge |
torque (N m) |
Observation Space#
Observations consist of positional values of different body parts of the cheetah, followed by the velocities of those individual parts (their derivatives) with all the positions ordered before all the velocities.
By default, observations do not include the x-coordinate of the cheetah’s center of mass. It may
be included by passing exclude_current_positions_from_observation=False
during construction.
In that case, the observation space will have 18 dimensions where the first dimension
represents the x-coordinate of the cheetah’s center of mass.
Regardless of whether exclude_current_positions_from_observation
was set to true or false, the x-coordinate
will be returned in info
with key "x_position"
.
However, by default, the observation is a ndarray
with shape (17,)
where the elements correspond to the following:
Num |
Observation |
Min |
Max |
Name (in corresponding XML file) |
Joint |
Unit |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0 |
z-coordinate of the front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
rootz |
slide |
position (m) |
1 |
angle of the front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
rooty |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
2 |
angle of the second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
bthigh |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
3 |
angle of the second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
bshin |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
4 |
velocity of the tip along the x-axis |
-Inf |
Inf |
bfoot |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
5 |
velocity of the tip along the y-axis |
-Inf |
Inf |
fthigh |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
6 |
angular velocity of front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
fshin |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
7 |
angular velocity of second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
ffoot |
hinge |
angle (rad) |
8 |
x-coordinate of the front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
rootx |
slide |
velocity (m/s) |
9 |
y-coordinate of the front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
rootz |
slide |
velocity (m/s) |
10 |
angle of the front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
rooty |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
11 |
angle of the second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
bthigh |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
12 |
angle of the second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
bshin |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
13 |
velocity of the tip along the x-axis |
-Inf |
Inf |
bfoot |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
14 |
velocity of the tip along the y-axis |
-Inf |
Inf |
fthigh |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
15 |
angular velocity of front tip |
-Inf |
Inf |
fshin |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
16 |
angular velocity of second rotor |
-Inf |
Inf |
ffoot |
hinge |
angular velocity (rad/s) |
Rewards#
The reward consists of two parts:
forward_reward: A reward of moving forward which is measured as
forward_reward_weight
* (x-coordinate before action - x-coordinate after action)/dt. dt is the time between actions and is dependent on the frame_skip parameter (fixed to 5), where the frametime is 0.01 - making the default dt = 5 * 0.01 = 0.05. This reward would be positive if the cheetah runs forward (right).ctrl_cost: A cost for penalising the cheetah if it takes actions that are too large. It is measured as
ctrl_cost_weight
* sum(action2) wherectrl_cost_weight
is a parameter set for the control and has a default value of 0.1
The total reward returned is reward = forward_reward - ctrl_cost and info
will also contain the individual reward terms
Starting State#
All observations start in state (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,
0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,) with a noise added to the
initial state for stochasticity. As seen before, the first 8 values in the
state are positional and the last 9 values are velocity. A uniform noise in
the range of [-reset_noise_scale
, reset_noise_scale
] is added to the positional values while a standard
normal noise with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of reset_noise_scale
is added to the
initial velocity values of all zeros.
Episode Termination#
The episode terminates when the episode length is greater than 1000.
Arguments#
No additional arguments are currently supported in v2 and lower.
env = gym.make('HalfCheetah-v2')
v3 and beyond take gym.make kwargs such as xml_file, ctrl_cost_weight, reset_noise_scale etc.
env = gym.make('HalfCheetah-v3', ctrl_cost_weight=0.1, ....)
Parameter |
Type |
Default |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
|
str |
|
Path to a MuJoCo model |
|
float |
|
Weight for forward_reward term (see section on reward) |
|
float |
|
Weight for ctrl_cost weight (see section on reward) |
|
float |
|
Scale of random perturbations of initial position and velocity (see section on Starting State) |
|
bool |
|
Whether or not to omit the x-coordinate from observations. Excluding the position can serve as an inductive bias to induce position-agnostic behavior in policies |
Version History#
v3: support for gym.make kwargs such as xml_file, ctrl_cost_weight, reset_noise_scale etc. rgb rendering comes from tracking camera (so agent does not run away from screen)
v2: All continuous control environments now use mujoco_py >= 1.50
v1: max_time_steps raised to 1000 for robot based tasks. Added reward_threshold to environments.
v0: Initial versions release (1.0.0)