DITTO: Dexterous Interface for Transparent 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/.

Dexterous robotic hands perform complex, contact-rich manipulation. Imitation learning provides a route to such skills, but collecting human demonstrations with accurate hand actions and rich tactile information remains a key bottleneck. We present MILE, a teleoperation-based data-collection system comprising the wearable MILE exoskeleton and the mechanically corresponding MILE-Tac robotic hand. Because human-hand anatomy and wearability place tighter constraints on the high-DoF wearable, our human-first design begins with the MILE exoskeleton, equipped with custom modular joint encoders for accurate joint-angle acquisition. We then design the MILE-Tac robotic hand to share the exoskeleton's selected kinematic topology and joint-axis arrangement while satisfying robot-side implementation constraints, and equip its fingertips with compact visuotactile sensor modules. This correspondence enables direct exoskeleton-to-robot joint-space command transfer without online task-space inverse-kinematics retargeting. During teleoperation, the system synchronously records task-specific visual observations, four fingertip visuotactile streams, robot-hand proprioception, and exoskeleton-derived action commands. In a four-task teleoperation benchmark, MILE achieved a mean success rate of 76%, compared with 28% and 8% for glove-based and vision-based baselines, respectively. For downstream imitation learning, we trained paired ACT and DP policies with and without tactile input on MILE-collected demonstrations. The tactile-input variants achieved higher success rates in all paired evaluations.

Data-driven dexterous hand manipulation requires large-scale, physically consistent demonstration data. Simulation and video-based methods suffer from sim-to-real gaps and retargeting problems, while MoCap glove-based teleoperation systems require per-operator calibration and lack portability, as the robot hand is typically fixed to a stationary arm. Portable alternatives improve mobility but lack cross-platform and cross-operator compatibility. We present DEX-Mouse, a portable, calibration-free hand-held teleoperation interface with integrated kinesthetic force feedback, built from commercial off-the-shelf components under USD 150. The operator-agnostic design requires no calibration or structural modification, enabling immediate deployment across diverse environments and platforms. The interface supports a configuration in which the target robot hand is mounted directly on the forearm of an operator, producing robot-aligned data. In a comparative user study across various dexterous manipulation tasks, operators using the proposed system achieved an 86.67% task completion rate under the attached configuration. Also, we found that the attached configuration reduced the perceived workload of the operators compared to spatially separated teleoperation setups across all compared interfaces. The complete hardware and software stack, including bill of materials, CAD models, and firmware, is open-sourced at https://dex-mouse.github.io/ to facilitate replication and adoption.