VMAS-1.3.0

Vectorized physics eginge

If you are using vmas, this is the time to pull.

The physics engine has been rewritten to run vectorised over the agents (not only over environments) with no changes at all to the VMAS logic and interface.

The change

• Before: vmas was vectorized over the environments, but the engine that resolves collisions and constraints ran a double for loop over the entities
• Now: the double for loop over the entities has been replaced by vectorization, making vmas vectorized both in the agent and in the environment dimensions while still keeping the possibility of heterogeneity among the agents.

What it means

• Normal environments can observe speedups around 10x
• Environments with high density of collidable entities will observe incredible speedups (especially on gpu) up to 10000x
• Simulating environments with large number of agents and entities of different shapes should be significantly faster with better computational scaling in the number of entities

Car-like robot dynamics

Thanks to @Jianye-Xu VMAS now has dynamics for car like robots. Meaning that you create your favourite traffic scenarios.
Check out the dedicated scenario to see how this works.

What's Changed

• [Refactor] use_vmas_env example compatible with 3d actions by @matteobettini in #69
• [Feature] New dynamics for car-like robots: kinematic bicycle model by @Jianye-Xu in #68
• [Rendering] Choose cmap to plot by @matteobettini in #70
• [Perf] Vectorized collisions and other major perf improvements by @matteobettini in #71

New Contributors

• @Jianye-Xu made their first contribution in #68

Full Changelog: VMAS-1.2.13...VMAS-1.3.0