TeleDex: Accessible Dexterous Teleoperation

Learning dexterous manipulation requires demonstrations that preserve fine hand-object interactions while remaining executable at deployment. Existing pipelines either lose deployable dexterity through retargeting or embodiment conversion, or rely on robot-specific teleoperation that is costly to scale and often lacks intuitive, contact-aware control for dexterous data collection. We present RealDexUMI, a wearable universal manipulation interface built around a shared dexterous end-effector module that integrates a lightweight dexterous hand, in-hand vision, and fingertip tactile sensing. A palm-side isomorphic teleoperation glove maps human finger inputs to robot-hand joint commands, enabling real-time, retargeting-free, intuitive, and precise hand control. The shared hand and sensing modules yield zero-gap end-effector data, with matched in-hand observations, tactile signals, contacts, and hand actions between collection and deployment. Across eight real-robot tasks spanning fine-grained, contact-rich, long-horizon, and bimanual manipulation, policies trained on RealDexUMI data achieve an average success rate of 88.75%, generalize to unseen initial poses, and transfer across three embodiments. Website: https://research.beingbeyond.com/realdexumi

Humans routinely wield tools, swap grasps, and reposition objects within a single hand, seamlessly orchestrating contact transitions that span translation, reorientation, and finger gaiting. Endowing robot dexterous hands with this level of in-hand dexterity through teleoperation requires precise control of object motion via dynamic hand-object contact, yet current teleoperation systems remain far from this capability. To bridge this gap, we take a major step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation by introducing TeleDexter, a hand-object co-tracking controller that maps operator intent into learned, low-level contact execution. The controller is trained on consecutive co-tracking subgoals derived from human reference motions, utilizing a hybrid reward that couples sparse subgoal objectives with dense tracking rewards to enable learning across diverse interaction modalities rather than frame-wise trajectory imitation. The entire pipeline requires only single-stage RL and, with random action masking and domain randomization, transfers zero-shot to the real robot. We evaluate TeleDexter on seven challenging dexterous teleoperation tasks spanning object reorientation and long-horizon tool use across two dexterous hands, achieving a 75% average success rate where all baselines consistently fail. Furthermore, the collected demonstrations successfully train autonomous policies via behavioral cloning, marking a concrete step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation.

Teleoperated demonstrations are a primary source of data for robot manipulation, and teleoperated interventions are a primary mechanism for correcting policies at deployment. Yet most teleoperation systems close the loop through vision alone and are built around parallel-jaw grippers, limiting both what the robot can execute and what the operator can express through it. This is most damaging in shared autonomy, where the operator sees the scene only through occluded cameras and must take over a dexterous hand mid-task, often with an object already grasped. We present DITTO-X, a hand-agnostic dexterous teleoperation interface that renders joint-level force and fingertip contact events from sensing already on the robot hand, and drives three commercial dexterous hands (Sharpa, Wuji, and Inspire) without per-hand redesign. Because the exoskeleton is actuated, DITTO-X also supports reverse teleoperation, in which the robot back-drives the operator's fingers into its own configuration before control is transferred, so the human enters the loop already matched to the state they inherit. Our results show that DITTO-X improves demonstration quality and throughput over a commercial hand-tracking glove, both in regular data collection and in human intervention during policy deployment for contact-rich manipulation tasks. More information can be found from our website: https://tml.stanford.edu/ditto-x/.