Robotics has always been a fascinating subject, but most people are reluctant to experiment in robotics imagining the complexity of hardware and knowledge of different software associated with it. Facebook AI researcher's(FAIR) latest research will motivate such people to start working on robots. PyRobot is a framework that helps AI researches and students to get up and running with a robot within a few hours, without specialized knowledge of hardware or of details such as device drivers, control, etc. FAIR is now open-sourcing PyRobot to help others in the AI community. The robot operating system forms the base for PyRobot. It gives a reliable arrangement of hardware-independent midlevel APIs to control various robots.

Facebook's AI team has been extra thirsty for robotics lately. Over the course of the past year, Facebook has expanded its robotics operations around the world and taught hexapod robots to walk. Last week, Facebook AI released the Replica photorealistic training data set and Habitat, a simulation engine for embodied AI, like robots. As part of that same effort, Facebook AI today introduced open source robotics framework PyRobot. Created in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University researchers, PyRobot can run deep learning models trained by Facebook's machine learning framework PyTorch.

This paper introduces PyRobot, an open-source robotics framework for research and benchmarking. PyRobot is a light-weight, high-level interface on top of ROS that provides a consistent set of hardware independent mid-level APIs to control different robots. PyRobot abstracts away details about low-level controllers and inter-process communication, and allows non-robotics researchers (ML, CV researchers) to focus on building high-level AI applications. PyRobot aims to provide a research ecosystem with convenient access to robotics datasets, algorithm implementations and models that can be used to quickly create a state-of-the-art baseline. We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics. PyRobot is open-source, and can be accessed via https://pyrobot.org.