The use of simulators in robotics research is widespread, underpinning the majority of recent advances in the field. There are now more options available to researchers than ever before, however navigating through the plethora of choices in search of the right simulator is often non-trivial. Depending on the field of research and the scenario to be simulated there will often be a range of suitable physics simulators from which it is difficult to ascertain the most relevant one. We have compiled a broad review of physics simulators for use within the major fields of robotics research. More specifically, we navigate through key sub-domains and discuss the features, benefits, applications and use-cases of the different simulators categorised by the respective research communities. Our review provides an extensive index of the leading physics simulators applicable to robotics researchers and aims to assist them in choosing the best simulator for their use case.
This paper presents TCE: Temporally Coherent Embeddings for self-supervised video representation learning. The proposed method exploits inherent structure of unlabeled video data to explicitly enforce temporal coherency in the embedding space, rather than indirectly learning it through ranking or predictive pretext tasks. In the same way that high-level visual information in the world changes smoothly, we believe that nearby frames in learned representations should demonstrate similar properties. Using this assumption, we train the TCE model to encode videos such that adjacent frames exist close to each other and videos are separated from one another. Using TCE we learn robust representations from large quantities of unlabeled video data. We evaluate our self-supervised trained TCE model by adding a classification layer and finetuning the learned representation on the downstream task of video action recognition on the UCF101 dataset. We obtain 67.01% accuracy and outperform the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods despite using a significantly smaller dataset for pre-training. Notably, we demonstrate results competitive with more complex 3D-CNN based networks while training with a 2D-CNN network backbone on action recognition tasks. The code and pre-trained models for this paper can be downloaded at http://github.com/csiro-robotics/tce.git.
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