pgtg 0.4.0

Python simulation of a driving challange. Compatible with the Gymnasium API standard.

ProcGrid Traffic Gym (pgtg)

A driving simulation on a grid with procedural generated maps and traffic. Compatible with the Gymnasium API standard.

Installation

pip install pgtg

Usage

The easiest way to use pgtg is to create the environment with gymnasium:

import pgtg
env = gymnasium.make("pgtg-v2")

The package relies on import side-effects to register the environment name so, even though the package is never explicitly used, its import is necessary to access the environment.

If you want to access the environment constructor directly this is also possible:

from pgtg import PGTGEnv
env = PGTGEnv()

Environment

ProcGrid Traffic Gym procedurally generates a map consisting of multiple preconstructed tiles or loads a map from a file. The goal is to drive from the start of the map to the end. The navigation task is not part of this environment, instead a shortest path is provided and marked on the map.

The environment is highly customizable, see the environment constructor for more info.

Action Space

ProcGrid Traffic Gym has a Discrete(9) action space.

Value	Meaning
0	accelerate left and up
1	accelerate left
2	accelerate left and down
3	accelerate up
4	don't accelerate
5	accelerate down
6	accelerate right and up
7	accelerate right
8	accelerate right and down

Observation Space

ProcGrid Traffic Gym has a Dict observation space that shows the 9x9 area the agent currently is inside or, if a sliding observation window is used, a area of the specified size centered on the agent.

Key	Type	Explanation
"position"	MultiDiscrete	The x and y position of the agent within the observation window or, if a sliding observation window is used, always (0, 0).
"velocity"	Box	The velocity of the agent in x and y direction.
"map"	Dict	The current observation window. The keys are the name of the features ("walls", "goals", "ice", "broken road", "sand", and "traffic"). Each item is a MultiBinary that encodes that feature as a hot one encoding.
"next_subgoal_direction"	Discrete(5)	The direction of the next subgoal or -1 if there is no next subgoal (most likely because the agent took a wrong turn). This is disabled by default. It can be enabled with the use_next_subgoal_direction argument of the environment constructor.

Most reinforcement learning implementations can't deal with Dict observations directly, thus it might be necessary to flatten the observations. This is easily doable with the gymnasium.wrappers.FlattenObservation wrapper:

from gymnasium.wrappers import FlattenObservation
env = FlattenObservation(env)

Reward

Crossing a subgoal is rewarded with +100 / number of subgoals as is finishing the whole map. Moving into a wall or traffic is punished with -100 and ends the episode. Standing still or moving to a already visited position can also penalized but is not per default. The reward values for each of this can be customized.

Render modes

Name	Explanation
human	render() returns None but a pygame window showing the environment is opened automatically when step() is called.
rgb_array	render() returns a np.array representing a image.
pil_image	render() returns a PIL.Image.Image, useful for displaying inside jupiter notebooks.

Obstacles

Name	Effect
Ice	When driving over a square with ice, there is a chance the agent moves in a random direction instead of the expected one.
Sand	When driving over sand, there is a chance that the agent is slowed, as the velocity is reset to 0.
Broken road	When driving over broken road, there is a chance for the agent to get a flat tire. This slows the agent down, as the velocity is reset to 0 every step. A flat tire lasts until the end of the episode.

Version History

v0.1.0

• initial release

v0.2.0

• Sand now slows down with a customizable probability (default 20%) instead of always.
• Bump environment version to v1 because the changes impact reproducibility with earlier versions.

v0.3.0

• The x and y coordinates of observations are no longer swapped. This was the case for historical reasons but serves no use any more.
• Adds the option to use a sliding observation window of variable size.
• Adds the option to use the direction of the next subgoal as a additional observation.
• Bump environment version to v2 because the changes impact reproducibility with earlier versions.

v0.3.1

• Fix bug that made it impossible to save a map as a file.

v0.4.0

• Adds the option to have the start and goal of a map at custom or random positions.
• Bump environment version to v3 because the changes impact reproducibility with earlier versions.
• Update dependencies to allow for use with python versions ^3.10.