Hey everyone,
I have been working on the AIC challenge on a Mac with Apple Silicon and spent a fair amount of time getting the environment running properly. Sharing what worked here in case it saves other Mac users the same headaches.
The main issues on macOS are: the eval image is x86-only so you need QEMU emulation via Docker, X11 forwarding from Docker doesn’t work reliably on macOS so Gazebo needs a browser-based display instead, and the default Gazebo world is too heavy to run at usable speed under emulation.
I have put together a shell script that handles all of this - sets up the container, configures noVNC so Gazebo renders in your browser, and patches the Gazebo world file to disable Global Illumination and reduce physics load so the simulation actually runs at reasonable speed. The patch also survives container restarts automatically.
Repo: https://github.com/Nikhil-Singhal-06/aic-macos-setup
Expect ~7fps camera and roughly real-time simulation speed. This won’t be sufficient for training models or running compute-intensive policies, but it’s perfectly usable for testing your policy logic, getting familiar with the challenge environment, and iterating on ideas.
Full details in the README. Hope it helps 
