MyoSuite: A contact-rich simulation suite for musculoskeletal motor control

Embodied agents in continuous control domains have been traditionally exposed to tasks with limited opportunity to explore musculoskeletal details that enable agile and nimble behaviors in biological beings. The sophistication behind bio-musculoskeletal control not only poses new challenges for the learning community but realizing agents embedded in the same perception-action loop that the human sensory-motor system solves can also have a far-reaching impact in fields of neuro-motor disorders, rehabilitation, assistive technologies, as well as collaborative-robotics. Human biomechanics is a complex multi-joint-multi-actuator musculoskeletal system. The sensory-motor system relies on a range of sensory-contact rich and proprioceptive inputs that define and condition motor actuation required to exhibit intelligent behaviors in the physical world. Current frameworks for studying musculoskeletal control do not include at the same time the needed physiological sophistication of the musculoskeletal systems and support physical world interaction capabilities. In addition, they are neither embedded in complex and skillful motor tasks nor are computationally effective and scalable to study motor learning in the timescale that current learning paradigms require. To realize a platform where physiological detail and challenges behind human motor control can be investigated, we present a suite of physiologically accurate biomechanical models of elbow, wrist, and hand, with physical contact capabilities which allow complex and skillful contact-rich real-world tasks. The implemented motor tasks provide a great variability of control challenges: from simple postural control to skilled hand-object interactions involving tasks like turning a key, twirling a pen, rotating two balls in one hand, etc. Finally, by supporting physiological alterations in musculoskeletal geometry (tendon transfer), assistive devices (exoskeleton assistance), and muscle contraction dynamics (muscle fatigue, sarcopenia), we present real-life tasks with temporal changes, thereby exposing realistic non-stationary conditions in our tasks which most continuous control benchmarks lack