11. Utils Module

As with many growing software development projects, we also bundle various utility functions in a utils package. In this chapter we want to introduce you to some of the most useful functions. Please note, that these might change in future versions.

• 11. Utils Module
  • 11.1. Sim_Path
  • 11.2. Geometric Transformations
  • 11.3. Point Clouds
  • 11.4. Experimental: Gym Multiprocessing

11.1. Sim_Path

sim_path.py provides a wrapper around python's os.path.join() function. You can call this module to create absolute paths from paths relative to the ALR SimulationFramework toplevel directory, or other path needs.

sim_path.sim_framework_path('demos', 'mujoco', 'kitbash')
>>> ...SimulationFramework/demos/mujoco/kitbash/

sim_path.sim_framework_path('./envs/data/duck.obj')
>>> ...SimulationFramework/envs/data/duck.obj

sim_path.sim_framework_path('/home/user', 'documents', 'data.txt')
>>> /home/user/documents/data.txt

11.2. Geometric Transformations

geometric_transformation.py provides several functions for various conversions, especially with respect to rotations, e.g. euler-angle to rotation matrix euler2mat()

Additionally, you can also find Quaternion specific calculation functions in this module.

11.3. Point Clouds

point_clouds.py provides a helper class to visualize 3D point clouds in an interactive Open3D viewer.

11.4. Experimental: Gym Multiprocessing

The gym_utils.multiprocessing package provides some experimental functionality to parallelize our gym environments using multiprocessing. While this has been tested in a proof of concept, it must still be considered experimental. But it might provide a good starting point, or even ready-to-go wrapper with minimal adaptions to parallelize your gym environments and speed up your reinforcement learning task.

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