# Towards Space-Based Environmentally-Adaptive Grasping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21394 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21394/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot locomotion and manipulation, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 22 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot locomotion and manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-locomotion-and-manipulation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06560/) (2017)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [Dex-Net 2.0: Deep Learning to Plan Robust Grasps with Synthetic Point Clouds and Analytic Grasp Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09312/) (2017)
- [6-DOF GraspNet: Variational Grasp Generation for Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10520/) (2019)
- [Supersizing Self-supervision: Learning to Grasp from 50K Tries and 700 Robot Hours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06825/) (2015)
- [Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09956/) (2018)
- [Closing the Loop for Robotic Grasping: A Real-time, Generative Grasp Synthesis Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05172/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Detecting Robotic Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3592/) (2013)
- [Real-Time Grasp Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3128/) (2014)
- [Grammarization-Based Grasping with Deep Multi-Autoencoder Latent Space Exploration by Reinforcement Learning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08566/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires reliable execution under diverse conditions, yet many state-of-the-art systems still struggle with high-dimensional action spaces, sparse rewards, and slow generalization beyond carefully curated training scenarios. We study these limitations through the example of grasping in space environments. We learn control policies directly in a learned latent manifold that fuses (grammarizes) multiple modalities into a structured representation for policy decision-making. Building on GPU-accelerated physics simulation, we instantiate a set of single-shot manipulation tasks and achieve over 95% task success with Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)-based reinforcement learning in less than 1M environment steps, under continuously varying grasping conditions from step 1. This empirically shows faster convergence than representative state-of-the-art visual baselines under the same open-loop single-shot conditions. Our analysis indicates that explicitly reasoning in latent space yields more sample-efficient learning and improved robustness to novel object and gripper geometries, environmental clutter, and sensor configurations compared to standard baselines. We identify remaining limitations and outline directions toward fully adaptive and generalizable grasping in the extreme conditions of space.