Commands

Commands#

Commands specify what the policy should achieve at each moment: a target velocity, a reference trajectory, a goal position. The command manager generates these signals, resamples them at configurable intervals, and passes them to the policy through the observation system.

Registration#

Commands are registered in ManagerBasedRlEnvCfg as a dictionary mapping string names to CommandTermCfg instances. Unlike the function-based terms used by other managers, every command term is a class that inherits from CommandTerm.

The resampling_time_range field controls how often the command changes. After each resample the term draws a new timer value uniformly from the given (min, max) range in seconds. Commands are also resampled unconditionally on every episode reset.

commands = {
    "twist": UniformVelocityCommandCfg(
        entity_name="robot",
        resampling_time_range=(3.0, 8.0),
        ranges=UniformVelocityCommandCfg.Ranges(
            lin_vel_x=(-1.0, 1.0),
            lin_vel_y=(-1.0, 1.0),
            ang_vel_z=(-0.5, 0.5),
        ),
    ),
}

The generated_commands observation function reads the current command tensor by name and passes it to the policy:

ObservationTermCfg(
    func=mdp.generated_commands,
    params={"command_name": "twist"},
)

If the environment has no commands, the manager no-ops all operations and returns empty tensors. There is no special handling required.

Included command terms#

Each task ships with its own command terms tailored to its objective.

Term

Description

UniformVelocityCommand

Generates planar velocity commands [v_x, v_y, omega_z] sampled uniformly from configurable ranges. Supports a standing mode (fraction of environments receive zero velocity) and a heading mode (yaw rate replaced by a proportional controller tracking a sampled heading angle). Used by the velocity task.

LiftingCommand

Generates a 3D target position for a manipulated object. Supports fixed and dynamic difficulty modes. Tracks metrics including position error and episode success rate. Used by the manipulation task.

MotionCommand

Streams reference joint positions, velocities, and body poses from a pre-recorded .npz motion clip. Supports three start-frame sampling modes: "start" (always frame 0), "uniform" (random), and "adaptive" (biased toward difficult regions). At reset the robot is initialized from the sampled frame with optional perturbations. Used by the tracking task.

Each term can render debug visualizations in the interactive viewer when debug_vis=True is set in the configuration. The image below shows the ghost visualization from MotionCommand, which renders a translucent copy of the robot at the reference pose alongside the actual robot.

../_images/ghost_visualization.png

Viser visualization of the commanded reference motion for the G1 tracking task.#

Writing custom command terms#

A custom command term is a class inheriting from CommandTerm paired with a configuration dataclass inheriting from CommandTermCfg. The term must implement four methods: _resample_command(env_ids) to sample new goals, _update_command() for per-step updates, _update_metrics() for logging, and a command property returning the current goal tensor. The base class manages the resampling timer and reset logic automatically.

The configuration must implement a build(env) method that constructs the paired term instance.

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