  We introduce ROS-X-Habitat, a software interface that bridges the AI Habitat
platform for embodied learning-based agents with other robotics resources via
ROS. This interface not only offers standardized communication protocols
between embodied agents and simulators, but also enables physically and
photorealistic simulation that benefits the training and/or testing of
vision-based embodied agents. With this interface, roboticists can evaluate
their own Habitat RL agents in another ROS-based simulator or use Habitat Sim
v2 as the test bed for their own robotic algorithms. Through in silico
experiments, we demonstrate that ROS-X-Habitat has minimal impact on the
navigation performance and simulation speed of a Habitat RGBD agent; that a
standard set of ROS mapping, planning and navigation tools can run in Habitat
Sim v2; and that a Habitat agent can run in the standard ROS simulator Gazebo.
