ViHaTeleop: A Low-Cost, Lightweight Visual-Haptic Teleoperation System for Dexterous Manipulation Learning

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable success in robotic manipulation, their application has largely been confined to low-degree-of-freedom end-effectors performing simple, vision-guided pick-and-place tasks. Extending these models to human-like, bimanual dexterous manipulation-specifically contact-rich in-hand operations-introduces critical challenges in high-fidelity data acquisition, multi-skill learning, and multimodal sensory fusion. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to address these bottlenecks, built upon two components. First, we introduce IMCopilot (In-hand Manipulation Copilot), a suite of reinforcement learning-trained atomic skills that plays a dual role: it acts as a shared-autonomy assistant to simplify teleoperation data collection, and it serves as a callable low-level execution primitive for the VLA. Second, we present MoDE-VLA (Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA), an architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous force and tactile modalities into a pretrained VLA backbone. By utilizing a residual injection mechanism, MoDE-VLA enables contact-aware refinement without degrading the model's pretrained knowledge. We validate our approach on four tasks of escalating complexity, demonstrating doubled success rate improvement over the baseline in dexterous contact-rich tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently become a central direction in embodied AI, but current systems are restricted to either dual-gripper control or single-arm dexterous hand manipulation. While low-dimensional gripper control can often be handled with simpler methods, high-dimensional dexterous hand control benefits greatly from full end-to-end VLA learning. In this work, we introduce Dexora, the first open-source VLA system that natively targets dual-arm, dual-hand high-DoF manipulation. We design a hybrid teleoperation pipeline that decouples gross arm kinematics (captured with a custom exoskeleton backpack) from fine finger motion (markerless hand tracking via Apple Vision Pro), and that drives both a physical dual-arm dual-hand platform and an identical MuJoCo digital twin. Using that interface, we assemble a large training corpus: an embodiment-matched synthetic corpus (100K simulated trajectories, 6.5M frames) and a real-world dataset of 10K teleoperated episodes (2.92M frames). To mitigate noisy teleoperation demonstrations, we propose a data-quality-aware training recipe: an offline discriminator provides clip-level weights for diffusion-transformer policy training, down-weighting low-quality demonstrations. Empirically, Dexora outperforms competitive VLA baselines on both basic and dexterous benchmarks (e.g., average dexterous success 66.7% vs. 51.7%), attains 90% success on basic tasks, and shows robust out-of-distribution and cross-embodiment generalization. Ablations confirm the importance of real data and the discriminator for dexterity.

Tactile sensing is a crucial capability for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures, as it enables dexterous and safe manipulation in contact-rich tasks. However, reliance on dedicated tactile hardware increases cost and reduces reproducibility across robotic platforms. We argue that tactile-aware manipulation can be learned offline and deployed without direct haptic feedback at inference. To this end, we present HapticVLA, which proceeds in two tightly coupled stages: Safety-Aware Reward-Weighted Flow Matching (SA-RWFM) and Tactile Distillation (TD). SA-RWFM trains a flow-matching action expert that incorporates precomputed, safety-aware tactile rewards penalizing excessive grasping force and suboptimal grasping trajectories. TD further transfers this tactile-aware capability into a conventional VLA: we distill a compact tactile token from the SA-RWFM teacher and train a student VLA to predict that token from vision and state modalities, enabling tactile-aware action generation at inference without requiring on-board tactile sensors. This design preserves contact-rich tactile-aware reasoning within VLA while removing the need for on-board tactile sensors during deployment. On real-world experiments, HapticVLA achieves a mean success rate of 86.7%, consistently outperforming baseline VLAs - including versions provided with direct tactile feedback during inference.