# PyRobot: An Open-source Robotics Framework for Research and Benchmarking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08236/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02207/) (2021)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11565/) (2023)
- [HM3D-OVON: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14296/) (2024)
- [RobustNav: Towards Benchmarking Robustness in Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04531/) (2021)
- [Coupling Vision and Proprioception for Navigation of Legged Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02094/) (2021)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)
- [Fully Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13545/) (2021)
- [Is Mapping Necessary for Realistic PointGoal Navigation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00997/) (2022)
- [Differentiable SLAM-net: Learning Particle SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07593/) (2021)
- [Episodic Memory Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01652/) (2022)
- [TIDEE: Tidying Up Novel Rooms using Visuo-Semantic Commonsense Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10761/) (2022)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Visual Odometry Techniques for Embodied PointGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11550/) (2021)
- [Phone2Proc: Bringing Robust Robots Into Our Chaotic World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04819/) (2022)
- [Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11746/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Offline Reinforcement Learning on Real-Robot Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15690/) (2023)
- [PEANUT: Predicting and Navigating to Unseen Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02497/) (2022)
- [GridToPix: Training Embodied Agents with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00931/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01151/) (2021)
- [Breadcrumbs to the Goal: Goal-Conditioned Exploration from Human-in-the-Loop Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11049/) (2023)
- [Focus on Impact: Indoor Exploration with Intrinsic Motivation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08521/) (2021)
- [Out of the Box: Embodied Navigation in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05873/) (2021)
- [Lifelong Topological Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08488/) (2021)
- [An in-depth experimental study of sensor usage and visual reasoning of robots navigating in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14666/) (2021)
- [Object Manipulation via Visual Target Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08141/) (2022)
- [Modality-invariant Visual Odometry for Embodied Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00348/) (2023)
- [Persistent Homology Meets Object Unity: Object Recognition in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03815/) (2023)
- [DOZE: A Dataset for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Object Navigation in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19007/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Navigation with Global Map Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07184/) (2021)
- [droidlet: modular, heterogenous, multi-modal agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10384/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.