MetaUrban: A Simulation Platform for Embodied AI in Urban Spaces

Public urban spaces like streetscapes and plazas serve residents and accommodate social life in all its vibrant variations. Recent advances in Robotics and Embodied AI make public urban spaces no longer exclusive to humans. Food delivery bots and electric wheelchairs have started sharing sidewalks with pedestrians, while diverse robot dogs and humanoids have recently emerged in the street. Ensuring the generalizability and safety of these forthcoming mobile machines is crucial when navigating through the bustling streets in urban spaces. In this work, we present MetaUrban, a compositional simulation platform for Embodied AI research in urban spaces. MetaUrban can construct an infinite number of interactive urban scenes from compositional elements, covering a vast array of ground plans, object placements, pedestrians, vulnerable road users, and other mobile agents' appearances and dynamics. We design point navigation and social navigation tasks as the pilot study using MetaUrban for embodied AI research and establish various baselines of Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning. Experiments demonstrate that the compositional nature of the simulated environments can substantially improve the generalizability and safety of the trained mobile agents. MetaUrban will be made publicly available to provide more research opportunities and foster safe and trustworthy embodied AI in urban spaces.

ScenarioNet: Open-Source Platform for Large-Scale Traffic Scenario Simulation and Modeling

Large-scale driving datasets such as Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes substantially accelerate autonomous driving research, especially for perception tasks such as 3D detection and trajectory forecasting. Since the driving logs in these datasets contain HD maps and detailed object annotations which accurately reflect the real-world complexity of traffic behaviors, we can harvest a massive number of complex traffic scenarios and recreate their digital twins in simulation. Compared to the hand-crafted scenarios often used in existing simulators, data-driven scenarios collected from the real world can facilitate many research opportunities in machine learning and autonomous driving. In this work, we present ScenarioNet, an open-source platform for large-scale traffic scenario modeling and simulation. ScenarioNet defines a unified scenario description format and collects a large-scale repository of real-world traffic scenarios from the heterogeneous data in various driving datasets including Waymo, nuScenes, Lyft L5, and nuPlan datasets. These scenarios can be further replayed and interacted with in multiple views from Bird-Eye-View layout to realistic 3D rendering in MetaDrive simulator. This provides a benchmark for evaluating the safety of autonomous driving stacks in simulation before their real-world deployment. We further demonstrate the strengths of ScenarioNet on large-scale scenario generation, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning in both single-agent and multi-agent settings. Code, demo videos, and website are available at https://metadriverse.github.io/scenarionet.