Grid World Environment

A deterministic 5x5 grid world. The agent starts in the top-left corner and must reach the goal in the bottom-right corner. It’s a small testbed for RL agents and a compact example of an OpenEnv environment (models, environment, server and client in a few files).

Quick Start

Start the server from envs/grid_world_env/:

uv run server

Then connect with the client:

from grid_world_env import GridWorldAction, GridWorldEnv

with GridWorldEnv(base_url="http://localhost:8000").sync() as env:
    result = env.reset()
    print(result.observation.message)  # Welcome to Grid World! Goal is at [4, 4].

    for move in ["DOWN"] * 4 + ["RIGHT"] * 4:
        result = env.step(GridWorldAction(action=move))
        print(move, result.observation.x, result.observation.y, result.reward, result.done)

The last step reaches (4, 4) with reward 1.0 and done=True. The API docs are at http://localhost:8000/docs.

Docker

The image builds on the OpenEnv base image. From the repository root:

docker build -t envtorch-base:latest -f src/openenv/core/containers/images/Dockerfile .
docker build -t grid-world-env:latest -f envs/grid_world_env/server/Dockerfile .
docker run -p 8000:8000 grid-world-env:latest

./envs/grid_world_env/test_grid_world.sh (run from the repository root) builds both images, starts the container, checks the endpoints with curl and cleans up.

Environment Details

Action

GridWorldAction: action, one of UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT (MoveAction enum or the string). UP and DOWN change x, LEFT and RIGHT change y. A move off the grid leaves the agent in place.

Observation

GridWorldObservation:

• x, y: agent position, from (0, 0) to (4, 4)
• message: status message
• reward, done

state() returns the standard State (episode_id, step_count).

Reward

• -0.1 for every step that doesn’t reach the goal
• +1.0 for reaching the goal at (4, 4), which ends the episode

There is no step limit: the episode only ends at the goal.

Code Layout

• models.py: MoveAction, GridWorldAction and GridWorldObservation
• server/grid_world_environment.py: GridWorldEnvironment (reset, step, reward)
• server/app.py: the server, built with create_app
• client.py: GridWorldEnv, with a step_move(MoveAction.UP) helper

To build your own environment, see Your First Environment.