MIRROR: Visual Motion Imitation via Real-time Retargeting and Teleoperation with Parallel Differential Inverse Kinematics
Organizations: Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA.
Abstract
Real-time humanoid teleoperation requires inverse kinematics (IK) solvers that are both responsive and constraint-safe under kinematic redundancy and self-collision constraints. While differential IK enables efficient online retargeting, its locally linearized updates are inherently basin-dependent and often become trapped near joint limits, singularities, or active collision boundaries, leading to unsafe or stagnant behavior. We propose a GPU-parallelized, continuation-based differential IK that improves escape from such constraint-induced local minima while preserving real-time performance, promoting safety and stability. Multiple constrained IK quadratic programs are evaluated in parallel, together with a self-collision avoidance control barrier function (CBF), and a Lyapunov-based progression criterion selects updates that reduce the final global task-space error. The method is paired with a visual skeletal pose estimation pipeline that enables robust, real-time upper-body teleoperation on the THEMIS humanoid robot hardware in real-world tasks.
Figures & tables
| Method | Batch | Solve Time [ms] | [mm] | [mm] | Self Collision | Singularity | Stagnation | |
| Global IK (SQP) | 1 | – | ||||||
| Monolithic QP | 1 | – | ||||||
| Distributed QP | 1 | – | ||||||
| Parallel Dist. QPs - Continuation - certificate | – | |||||||
| – | ||||||||
| Parallel Mono. QPs - Continuation - certificate | 0.0005 |
Inverse Kinematics
Inverse kinematics maps desired robot or articulated-body motions to joint configurations while handling constraints, redundancy, and multiple solutions.
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