Environment Configuration

The Space Robotics Bench provides a flexible configuration system for environments through Hydra. This document explains how to customize environment parameters across different domains and tasks.

How Does It Work?

Each SRB environment is registered alongside its Python configuration class, which defines the default parameters for that specific environment. All environment configuration classes are organized in a hierarchical structure via inheritance, where BaseEnvCfg does most of the heavy lifting. This design supports a modular and extensible configuration system that allows for easy customization of environment parameters.

Modifying Configurations

You can modify environment configurations in several ways:

1. Command-Line Overrides

The most direct way to modify environment parameters is through command-line overrides:

srb agent <WORKFLOW> --env <ENV> \
    env.domain=moon \
    env.robot=ur10 \
    env.num_envs=4 \
    env.stack=false \
    ...

2. Configuration Files

Each SRB environment is backed by a Python configuration class (a @configclass-decorated dataclass extending BaseEnvCfg). When you launch a task, Hydra extracts the default values from this class and merges them with any command-line overrides.

To inspect the full set of defaults for any environment, read its Python configuration class directly (shown below) — Hydra extracts these defaults from the class at launch. Every run also dumps its resolved configuration to <logdir>/.hydra/config.yaml, which doubles as a reference for the expected YAML structure.

If you want to persist a set of overrides, create a YAML file and pass its path via the --cfg flag:

srb agent zero --env peg_in_hole --cfg ./my_overrides.yaml

where my_overrides.yaml contains:

env:
  domain: mars
  num_envs: 8
  robot: ur10

Note: --cfg also accepts default (use the environment’s default config) and ignore/none/null (no config file).

Tip: Shortcut syntax is supported for assets — env.robot=franka is automatically expanded to env.robot.name=franka.

Key Parameters

Below are the most important configuration parameters organized by category (several parameters have their own detailed documentation pages):

Scenario/Environment

• env.domain - Domain
• env.robot - Robot
• env.num_envs, env.stack - Parallelism
• env.particles - Particles
• env.reward - Reward & Normalization

Simulation

• env.sim - Low-level simulation parameters (physics, rendering, etc.)
• env.visuals - Visual appearance settings

Debugging

• env.debug_vis - Enables debug visualization features