OmniLRS: A Photorealistic Simulator for Lunar Robotics

Developing algorithms for extra-terrestrial robotic exploration has always been challenging. Along with the com- plexity associated with these environments, one of the main issues remains the evaluation of said algorithms. With the regained interest in lunar exploration, there is also a demand for quality simulators that will enable the development of lunar robots. In this paper, we propose Omniverse Lunar Robotic-Sim (OmniLRS) that is a photorealistic Lunar sim- ulator based on Nvidia’s robotic simulator. This simulation provides fast procedural environment generation, multi-robot capabilities, along with synthetic data pipeline for machine- learning applications. It comes with ROS1 and ROS2 bindings to control not only the robots, but also the environments. This work also performs sim-to-real rock instance segmentation to show the effectiveness of our simulator for image-based perception. Trained on our synthetic data, a yolov8 model achieves performance close to a model trained on real-world data, with 5% performance gap. When finetuned with real data, the model achieves 14% higher average precision than the model trained on real-world data, demonstrating our sim- ulator’s photorealism. The code is fully open-source, accessible here: https://github.com/AntoineRichard/OmniLRS, and comes with demonstrations.