Habitat-Lab is an open-source platform for training and evaluating embodied AI agents in photorealistic 3D indoor environments. It functions as a high-performance 3D indoor environment simulator that supports physics-based interaction, enabling research into navigation and manipulation tasks.
The platform provides a modular task-environment abstraction that separates task logic from environment simulation, using configuration-driven pipeline assembly to compose simulation and training pipelines. It includes a hierarchical sensor-actuator architecture for mixing and matching perception and action components per task, along with dataset-centric task loading that defines scene configurations, object placements, and success criteria. The system offers interactive agent visualization through top-down maps, 3D scene views, and step-by-step task execution in notebooks, as well as a ROS integration bridge for connecting the simulation to external robotics frameworks.
The platform supports training agents using PPO-based reinforcement learning with vectorized environments and reward shaping, and provides pre-built baseline integrations for embodied AI tasks. It also enables virtual robot teleoperation through keyboard controls for manual testing and exploration.