strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient

Shadow Hand in-hand cube reorientation, recorded in NVIDIA Isaac Lab through strands-robots. A PPO policy trained with strands' isaaclab train_policy provider (PR #4227) spins a cube in the palm to match a random goal orientation; its rollouts were recorded as a LeRobot v3 dataset with strands' DatasetRecorder.

4 of the recorded envs (2×2 grid) from the strands camera — mp4. Policy: cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient-policy.

episodes / frames	12 / 3355 at 60 fps
camera	observation.images.front 320×240 RTX, fixed
observation.state	188-D = 24 joint pos + 157-D policy observation (policy_obs.*) + root pos (3) + root quat xyzw (4)
action	20-D raw policy action (16 joint position targets + 4 tendon targets), 60 Hz
task string	"reorient the cube in hand to match the goal orientation"
episode return (mean)	56.1 (episodes 1–11: 43.6 – 69.7; episode 0: 4.0, dropped at frame 55)
checks	strands verify_dataset ok · LeRobotDataset load ok · video decode ok · NaN/inf = 0 · Hub round-trip ok

Results (the policy that generated this data)

Trained with 8192 parallel envs × 3000 PPO iterations (393 M env steps) in 59 min 50 s on one NVIDIA L40S. Mean reward 0.02 → 102.6 (best) → 91.9 (last), success rate 0.93 at the last iteration (best 0.96); throughput median 110 k env-steps/s (max 166 k solo; the GPU was shared with a G1 run for part of it).

PPO iteration	mean reward	success rate	mean ep. length (of 600)	orientation error (rad)	env-steps/s
0	0.02	0.000	13	2.041	71,679
300	8.84	0.297	470	1.405	95,302
750	56.23	0.895	548	1.334	98,068
1500	83.34	0.915	568	1.354	112,092
2250	92.01	0.939	563	1.407	112,528
2999	91.93	0.934	535	1.393	111,316

How it was made with strands-robots

Setup

# Isaac Lab in its OWN venv (its pins clash with strands; strands never imports it)
uv venv --python 3.12 ~/il && uv pip install --python ~/il/bin/python --prerelease=allow \
  --index https://pypi.nvidia.com --index-strategy unsafe-best-match "isaaclab[rsl-rl,isaacsim]==3.0.0rc1"
export ISAACLAB_PYTHON=~/il/bin/python
export OMNI_KIT_ACCEPT_EULA=YES          # you accept the NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim EULA yourself
pip install "git+https://github.com/cagataycali/robots@feat/isaaclab-trainer"   # strands-robots with PR #4227

1 · Train through the isaaclab train_policy provider

As an agent tool call (the train_policy tool is a Strands @tool):

from strands import Agent
from strands_robots.tools.train_policy import train_policy

agent = Agent(tools=[train_policy])
agent("Train the Shadow hand to reorient a cube with the isaaclab provider: task Isaac-Reorient-Cube-Shadow, 3000 iterations, seed 1.")
# -> train_policy(action="train", provider="isaaclab", steps=3000, seed=1, output_dir="runs/c2_shadow_reorient",
#                 extra={"task": "Isaac-Reorient-Cube-Shadow", "num_envs": 8192, "timeout_s": 10800})

As plain Python (exactly what produced this run; num_envs 8192 is also the task default):

from strands_robots.tools.train_policy import train_policy

job = train_policy(action="train", provider="isaaclab", steps=3000, seed=1,
                   output_dir="runs/c2_shadow_reorient",
                   extra={"task": "Isaac-Reorient-Cube-Shadow", "num_envs": 8192, "timeout_s": 10800})
# poll: iteration, rewards, learning verdict, steps_per_s, checkpoint_dir
train_policy(action="status", provider="isaaclab", job_id="<job_id from the result>")

Under the hood the provider runs python -m isaaclab train --rl_library rsl_rl --task Isaac-Reorient-Cube-Shadow --max_iterations 3000 --seed 1 in $ISAACLAB_PYTHON and parses its log. Job id of this run: isaaclab-20260929-034557-204417977ae5. Docs: docs/learn/training/isaaclab.md · PR: strands-labs/robots#4227.

2 · Record with strands DatasetRecorder

The final checkpoint was rolled out and recorded with examples/record_trained_policy.py (included in this repo). It runs in the Isaac Lab venv with strands on PYTHONPATH and:

1. rebuilds the task env in play mode and adds an RTX camera per env;
2. loads model_2999.pt with rsl_rl's OnPolicyRunner and exports TorchScript/ONNX with Isaac Lab's exporter;
3. wraps the exported actor as a strands Policy (RslRlJitPolicy, max |Δa| vs rsl_rl inference = 1.2e-05);
4. steps the env with policy.get_actions_sync(...) and writes every frame through strands DatasetRecorder (strands_robots.dataset_recorder.DatasetRecorder.create(...) → add_frame → save_episode, LeRobot v3);
5. verifies the result with strands verify_dataset + LeRobotDataset load + video decode + NaN scan.

OMNI_KIT_ACCEPT_EULA=YES PYTHONPATH=/path/to/strands-robots $ISAACLAB_PYTHON examples/record_trained_policy.py \
  --task Isaac-Reorient-Cube-Shadow --checkpoint model_2999.pt --episodes 12 --frames 300 \
  --cam fixed --cam_name front --eye 0.42,-0.72,0.85 --target 0,-0.39,0.55 \
  --task_str "reorient the cube in hand to match the goal orientation" --robot_type shadow_hand \
  --root out/ds --repo_id cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient
$ISAACLAB_PYTHON examples/record_trained_policy.py --verify out/ds --repo_id cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient

Use it

from lerobot.datasets.lerobot_dataset import LeRobotDataset

ds = LeRobotDataset("cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient")
print(ds.num_episodes, ds.num_frames, ds.fps)          # 12 3355 60
f = ds[0]; f["observation.state"].shape, f["action"].shape, f["observation.images.front"].shape
# (188,) (20,) (3, 240, 320)

Check it with strands (the same verifier strands runs after stop_recording):

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
from strands_robots.verify_dataset import verify_dataset

root = snapshot_download("cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient", repo_type="dataset")
report = verify_dataset(root, expected=12)
assert report["ok"], report["problems"]

Train a LeRobot policy on it (behaviour cloning of the RL expert) with strands' lerobot_local train_policy provider — same tool, different provider (not run for this card):

from strands_robots.tools.train_policy import train_policy
train_policy(action="train", provider="lerobot_local", dataset_repo_id="cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient",
             output_dir="runs/act_shadow", steps=20000, batch_size=32, extra={"policy_type": "act"})

To replay the expert itself, see the policy repo: cagataydev/strands-isaaclab-shadow-reorient-policy.

Provenance

• strands-robots: feat/isaaclab-trainer @ fa66fc68 — strands-labs/robots#4227 (isaaclab train_policy provider, IsaacLabTrainer; DatasetRecorder; verify_dataset)
• Isaac Lab 3.0.0rc1 · Isaac Sim 6.1.0.0 · PhysX (task default physics) · rsl-rl-lib 5.4.1 (PPO) · lerobot 0.6.1 · torch on CUDA
• GPU: 1× NVIDIA L40S (46 GB), shared with other runs for part of training
• Seeds: training seed 1 (params/agent.yaml, params/env.yaml); recording seed 7
• Training job: isaaclab-20260929-034557-204417977ae5, 2026-09-29
• Recording: examples/record_trained_policy.py, play-mode env cfg, recording seed 7, 91 s wall (policy 5.4 ms / env step 135 ms with RTX rendering)

Limitations

• Simulation only. Nothing here was run on a real Shadow Hand; no sim-to-real claims.
• Release candidates: Isaac Lab 3.0.0rc1 on Isaac Sim 6.1.0.0; APIs and physics may change. PhysX and Newton results differ.
• Recording: 12 parallel envs from a common reset, 300 frames (5 s) each — episode 0 dropped the cube at frame 55 (terminated); the other 11 held it for the full window. observation.state mixes joint positions with the policy observation, so it is wide (188-D) and not a standard LeRobot "robot state".
• create_policy("rl") in strands cannot load this rsl_rl checkpoint yet (finding IL-X-006: strands' RL actor is Tanh, rsl_rl is ELU
  • obs-normalizer); use the exported TorchScript + the small wrapper shown above.
• Known provider findings tracked with the PR: IL-X-001 (NaN reward not surfaced), IL-X-004/005 (no stop / play action), IL-X-007 (status text hid a crash traceback).

License

Card choice: license: other — our generated data / weights under CC-BY-4.0, plus NVIDIA notices. Why:

• The recorded trajectories, rendered camera video, playback clips and the trained policy weights are user-generated content produced with NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab. The NVIDIA Omniverse License Agreement (which governs Isaac Sim 6.1, shipped as isaacsim/LICENSE.txt) §2.1 explicitly allows you to "distribute user generated content that you develop using Omniverse, such as video, audio, stills, models, 3D assets and screen captures". We release that content under CC-BY-4.0.
• No NVIDIA Content is redistributed: the Shadow Hand USD (Robots_Multiphysics/ShadowRobot/ShadowHandMultiPhysics_v0) and scene assets come from the Isaac Lab / Isaac Sim asset packs on NVIDIA's asset server and are not in this repo; params/env.yaml only references their paths. To reproduce you download them under your own NVIDIA EULA acceptance. "Shadow Hand" is a design of The Shadow Robot Company; no endorsement by Shadow Robot or NVIDIA is implied.
• params/*.yaml are Isaac Lab task / agent configurations (Isaac Lab is BSD-3-Clause); the example script is Apache-2.0 like strands-robots. Running Isaac Sim itself requires accepting the NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Omniverse EULA.