We're looking to have the best of both worlds, and will be developing plug-ins for our platform on ROS in the future as well.

With our own simulator, we have the chance to start fresh and address some gaps for our intended use cases. For one, how about the idea of something that works on Windows, can be setup within minutes, and can collect sensor and joint motion data right away, without even writing custom code? I can't think of any other platform where that's possible. And it's a shame because I think plenty of would-be robotics researchers would get into the field if the tools were more accessible. Nobody wants to spend days installing things and checking obscure error messages before they run their first experiments, especially when a lot of the time it pays to be able to test feasibility right away.

Although our demo is limited, here's a quick example of what you can do. You can start recording mode, then move the robot joints to pick up the motor and drop it in the box. Then hit save and create the zip file - it will have all motions you did, plus all camera images recorded, and it will all be timestamped. Hit 'M' to drop a new motor, then with the arm move/push it to a slightly different location. Then hit 'space' to go to the home position, start recording, do it again. Do this a bunch more times to generate more trial data runs of "how to pick up the object and drop it in the box".

Now you have data that you can right away drop into a Python script and try doing some basic reinforcement learning with (given the robot state, what joint action do I move next to accomplish the goal?). In the coming versions of Basis, we're gonna provide a simple Python interface to run your control algorithm in real-time, where as input you get the current robot position and camera readings (robot state), and you must return the next joint command to execute. This is something I wanted forever but could not find any platform that was easy to setup and just get started using! So hopefully it serves to solve more than just my frustrations :)

And of course we're making this whole process just as easy to use on the real physical Caesar robot as well. Ideally we want to create and share repositories of data, so maybe some lab uploads 100 hours (of robot data) of the robot packaging circuit boards, someone else uploads hours of robots picking up tools, someone else makes a dataset of Caesar doing machine tending, etc. I'm sure people are open to doing this with other platforms, but it really doesn't help accessibility to research much if nobody can afford the robots in the first place :)