Tournaments

Tournaments are rigorous, focused competitions centered on benchmarking and policy improvement. They are the primary engine through which Nepher Robotics produces valuable, open AI assets — not just leaderboard rankings.

What You Get From a Tournament

Every tournament is designed to leave behind reusable robotics IP:

Deliverable	Details
Policy checkpoints	Trained weights (.pt, JIT/ONNX exports) from top submissions
Isaac Lab task code	Full External Project repos with training and play scripts
Evaluation configs	Public scoring via eval-nav
Environment assets	OpenUSD scenes from EnvHub used in evaluation
Documentation	Task-specific READMEs (e.g. Spot Waypoint Navigation)

Winning packages are published to SimStore under the open-source tier so the community can analyze, fork, and deploy them.

Purpose & Scope

• Purpose: Drive optimization and identify the highest-performing robotic control policies for a well-defined task.
• Scope: Fixed robot, environment, and metrics — e.g., "Boston Dynamics Spot waypoint navigation across EnvHub benchmark scenes".
• Metrics: Objective measurements including success rate (70% weight) and time-to-completion (30% weight) in the V1 navigation scoring system.
• Stack: Isaac Sim 5.1+, Isaac Lab 2.3+, RSL-RL training, EnvHub OpenUSD scenes.
• Validation: Multiple independent validators score each agent using the same public eval-nav pipeline on Decentralized Physical AI infrastructure (Bittensor Subnet 49).
• Rewards: Winner-takes-all TAO payouts to the miner's registered wallet; subnet alpha emissions are burned during non-reward periods.
• Open source: Results — code, checkpoints, and configs — are published to accelerate Robotics AI.

What Competitors Optimize

Participants compete on the full stack of robot learning:

• RL algorithm design (reward functions, weights, auxiliary objectives)
• Training methodology (curriculum, domain randomization, hyperparameters)
• Data and environment selection (EnvHub scene diversity — train on waypoint-sample-v1, evaluated on hidden waypoint-benchmark-v1 scenes)
• Model architecture within the allowed framework (e.g., RSL-RL actor-critic)

Example Task Repository

The task-spot-waypointnav repo is a reference tournament task:

• Robot: Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped
• Architecture: Hierarchical — trainable high-level nav policy (3-dim velocity commands) + frozen low-level locomotion policy
• Requirements: Isaac Lab 2.3.2, Isaac Sim 5.1
• Registered envs: Nepher-Spot-WaypointNav-v0, Nepher-Spot-WaypointNav-Envhub-v0, and Play variants
• EnvHub integration: Standardized navigation scenes via npcli envhub download
• Self-evaluation: Same eval-nav configs validators use

Clone it as your starting point, or follow the structure when a new tournament task is announced.

Participation

Tournaments launch when a new task is ready. We run them sequentially so engineers can join based on availability and skill level.

When a tournament opens:

1. The task GitHub repo is published (environment, robot USD/URDF, training scripts)
2. Required EnvHub environments are listed for download via Nepher CLI
3. The evaluation config is defined in eval-nav YAML format
4. The Tournament dashboard shows phases, deadlines, and leaderboard

Task repos follow the Isaac Lab External Project pattern — the standard approach for custom robot policies on Omniverse.

Tournament Lifecycle

One tournament runs through five sessions, timed by Bittensor block numbers:

Session	Description
Contest	Miners train policies locally and submit signed agent ZIPs to the tournament API
Submit	Eligibility snapshot — on-chain Subnet 49 registration + submitted agent required
Evaluation	Validators download agents and run eval-nav on EnvHub benchmark scenes in headless Isaac Sim
Review	Admin team verifies top submission for integrity before approving winner
Reward	Winner receives TAO payout; validated assets flow to SimStore

Phase boundaries and incentive details are in the Incentive Mechanism guide.

Platform URLs

Service	URL
Tournament dashboard	https://tournament.nepher.ai
Tournament API	https://tournament-api.nepher.ai
Account & API keys	https://account.nepher.ai
EnvHub	https://envhub.nepher.ai

Guides & Tools

Resource	Link
Miner guide	https://docs.nepher.ai/miner-guide
Validator guide	https://docs.nepher.ai/validator-guide
Nepher CLI	https://docs.nepher.ai/nepher-cli
GitHub org	https://github.com/nepher-ai

Submit via CLI

pip install nepher-cli bittensor
npcli login --api-key nepher_xxxxxxxx
npcli tournament list-active
npcli tournament check --path ./my-agent
npcli tournament submit --path ./my-agent --wallet-name miner --wallet-hotkey default

Agent submissions must include best_policy/best_policy.pt and an Isaac Lab task module under source/<module>/. See Nepher CLI and the Miner Guide for the full workflow.