MuJoCo getting started

Tested on Ubuntu 23.10;

git clone https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
cd mujoco
git checkout 5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j

Now let's play. Minimal interactive UI simulation of a simple MJCF scene with one falling cube:

bin/basic ../doc/_static/hello.xml

Test soure code: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/blob/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/sample/basic.cc. The only thing you can do is rotate the scene with the computer mouse it seems. Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sabasic

Some more interesting models can be found under the model/ directory: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/tree/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/model E.g. the imaginary humanoid robot DeepMind used in many demos can be seen with:

bin/basic ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml

A more advanced UI with a few controls:

bin/simulate ../doc/_static/hello.xml

Test soure code: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/tree/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/simulate. Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sasimulate

A very cool thing about that UI is that you can manually control joints. There are no joints in the hello.xml, but e.g. with the humanoid model:

bin/simulate ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml

under "Control" you move each joint of the robot separately which is quite cool.

Video 1. Demo of MuJoCo's built-in simulate viewer by Yuval Tassa (2019) Source.

There's also a bin/record test executable that presumably renders the simulation directly to a file:

bin/record ../doc/_static/hello.xml 5 60 rgb.out
ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 800x800 -framerate 60 -i rgb.out -vf "vflip" video.mp4

Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sarecord but TODO that produced a broken video, related issues: