Genesis

Table of Contents

1. What is Genesis?
2. Key Features
3. Quick Installation
4. Documentation
5. Example Usage
6. Contributing to Genesis
7. Support
8. License and Acknowledgments
9. Associated Papers
10. Citation

What is Genesis?

Genesis is a physics platform designed for general-purpose Robotics/Embodied AI/Physical AI applications. It is simultaneously multiple things:

1. A universal physics engine re-built from the ground up, capable of simulating a wide range of materials and physical phenomena.
2. A lightweight, ultra-fast, pythonic, and user-friendly robotics simulation platform.
3. A powerful and fast photo-realistic rendering system.
4. A generative data engine that transforms user-prompted natural language description into various modalities of data.

Genesis aims to:

• Lower the barrier to using physics simulations, making robotics research accessible to everyone. See our mission statement.
• Unify diverse physics solvers into a single framework to recreate the physical world with the highest fidelity.
• Automate data generation, reducing human effort and letting the data flywheel spin on its own.

Project Page: https://genesis-embodied-ai.github.io/

Key Features

• Speed: Over 43 million FPS when simulating a Franka robotic arm with a single RTX 4090 (430,000 times faster than real-time).
• Cross-platform: Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and supports multiple compute backends (CPU, Nvidia/AMD GPUs, Apple Metal).
• Integration of diverse physics solvers: Rigid body, MPM, SPH, FEM, PBD, Stable Fluid.
• Wide range of material models: Simulation and coupling of rigid bodies, liquids, gases, deformable objects, thin-shell objects, and granular materials.
• Compatibility with various robots: Robotic arms, legged robots, drones, soft robots, and support for loading MJCF (.xml), URDF, .obj, .glb, .ply, .stl, and more.
• Photo-realistic rendering: Native ray-tracing-based rendering.
• Differentiability: Genesis is designed to be fully differentiable. Currently, our MPM solver and Tool Solver support differentiability, with other solvers planned for future versions (starting with rigid & articulated body solver).
• Physics-based tactile simulation: Differentiable tactile sensor simulation coming soon (expected in version 0.3.0).
• User-friendliness: Designed for simplicity, with intuitive installation and APIs.

Quick Installation

Genesis is available via PyPI:

pip install genesis-world  # Requires Python >=3.9;

You also need to install PyTorch following the official instructions.

For the latest version, clone the repository and install locally:

git clone https://github.com/Genesis-Embodied-AI/Genesis.git
cd Genesis
pip install -e .

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation is available in English and Chinese. This includes detailed installation steps, tutorials, and API references.

Contributing to Genesis

The Genesis project is an open and collaborative effort. We welcome all forms of contributions from the community, including:

• Pull requests for new features or bug fixes.
• Bug reports through GitHub Issues.
• Suggestions to improve Genesis's usability.

Refer to our contribution guide for more details.

Support

• Report bugs or request features via GitHub Issues.
• Join discussions or ask questions on GitHub Discussions.

License and Acknowledgments

The Genesis source code is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Genesis's development has been made possible thanks to these open-source projects:

• Taichi: High-performance cross-platform compute backend. Kudos to the Taichi team for their technical support!
• FluidLab: Reference MPM solver implementation.
• SPH_Taichi: Reference SPH solver implementation.
• Ten Minute Physics and PBF3D: Reference PBD solver implementations.
• MuJoCo: Reference for rigid body dynamics.
• libccd: Reference for collision detection.
• PyRender: Rasterization-based renderer.
• LuisaCompute and LuisaRender: Ray-tracing DSL.

Associated Papers

Genesis is a large scale effort that integrates state-of-the-art technologies of various existing and on-going research work into a single system. Here we include a non-exhaustive list of all the papers that contributed to the Genesis project in one way or another:

• Xian, Zhou, et al. "Fluidlab: A differentiable environment for benchmarking complex fluid manipulation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.02346 (2023).
• Xu, Zhenjia, et al. "Roboninja: Learning an adaptive cutting policy for multi-material objects." arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11553 (2023).
• Wang, Yufei, et al. "Robogen: Towards unleashing infinite data for automated robot learning via generative simulation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.01455 (2023).
• Wang, Tsun-Hsuan, et al. "Softzoo: A soft robot co-design benchmark for locomotion in diverse environments." arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.09555 (2023).
• Wang, Tsun-Hsuan Johnson, et al. "Diffusebot: Breeding soft robots with physics-augmented generative diffusion models." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2023): 44398-44423.
• Katara, Pushkal, Zhou Xian, and Katerina Fragkiadaki. "Gen2sim: Scaling up robot learning in simulation with generative models." 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2024.
• Si, Zilin, et al. "DiffTactile: A Physics-based Differentiable Tactile Simulator for Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.08716 (2024).
• Wang, Yian, et al. "Thin-Shell Object Manipulations With Differentiable Physics Simulations." arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.00451 (2024).
• Lin, Chunru, et al. "UBSoft: A Simulation Platform for Robotic Skill Learning in Unbounded Soft Environments." arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12711 (2024).
• Zhou, Wenyang, et al. "EMDM: Efficient motion diffusion model for fast and high-quality motion generation." European Conference on Computer Vision. Springer, Cham, 2025.
• Qiao, Yi-Ling, Junbang Liang, Vladlen Koltun, and Ming C. Lin. "Scalable differentiable physics for learning and control." International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2020.
• Qiao, Yi-Ling, Junbang Liang, Vladlen Koltun, and Ming C. Lin. "Efficient differentiable simulation of articulated bodies." In International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR, 2021.
• Qiao, Yi-Ling, Junbang Liang, Vladlen Koltun, and Ming Lin. "Differentiable simulation of soft multi-body systems." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (2021).
• Wan, Weilin, et al. "Tlcontrol: Trajectory and language control for human motion synthesis." arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.17135 (2023).
• Wang, Yian, et al. "Architect: Generating Vivid and Interactive 3D Scenes with Hierarchical 2D Inpainting." arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.09823 (2024).
• Zheng, Shaokun, et al. "LuisaRender: A high-performance rendering framework with layered and unified interfaces on stream architectures." ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 41.6 (2022): 1-19.
• Fan, Yingruo, et al. "Faceformer: Speech-driven 3d facial animation with transformers." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2022.
• Wu, Sichun, Kazi Injamamul Haque, and Zerrin Yumak. "ProbTalk3D: Non-Deterministic Emotion Controllable Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using VQ-VAE." Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games. 2024.
• Dou, Zhiyang, et al. "C· ase: Learning conditional adversarial skill embeddings for physics-based characters." SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers. 2023.

... and many more on-going work.

Citation

If you use Genesis in your research, please consider citing:

@software{Genesis,
  author = {Genesis Authors},
  title = {Genesis: A Universal and Generative Physics Engine for Robotics and Beyond},
  month = {December},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://github.com/Genesis-Embodied-AI/Genesis}
}