DexRoam: Learning Mobile Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation from Egocentric Whole-Body Human Demonstrations
Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · Beihang University · State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Abstract
Mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation requires continuous coordination of locomotion, whole-body motion, and finger-level dexterity within a single trajectory, creating a severe robot demonstration bottleneck. Egocentric human demonstrations offer a scalable alternative, but prior approaches ease the transfer by simplifying human motion, discarding exactly the fine-grained, coupled structure such tasks depend on. We present DexRoam, a complete system for learning mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation from human demonstrations, in which whole-body motion remains continuous and coupled throughout the human-to-robot transfer process. To enable scalable collection of whole-body human manipulation demonstrations, we develop a tracker-free capture system using only a consumer VR headset and a head-mounted stereo camera, without external cameras or motion trackers. We then perform three explicit alignment stages---embodiment, action-semantic, and temporal---to map captured motion into the robot action space, preserving fine-grained whole-body motion and allowing human and robot demonstrations to be jointly learned by standard VLA policies. Real-world experiments with different VLA backbones show that human demonstrations consistently improve policy learning across training paradigms, raising average success from 29% to 56% on GR00T N1.7 and from 32% to 57% on pi0.5, while matching robot-only training with half the robot demonstrations. Ablations confirm that each alignment stage is necessary. These results highlight the potential of human demonstrations for scalable whole-body mobile manipulation with preserved fine-grained motion structure.
Figures & tables
| Component | Metric | Pick Chips Can | Pour Water | Throw Trash | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Torso | Position | 13.49 | 11.82 | 12.31 | 12.54 |
| Rotation | 2.32 | 1.64 | 1.57 | 1.84 | |
| Left Arm | Position | 3.75 | 4.27 | 4.02 | 4.01 |
| Rotation | 0.51 | 0.58 | 0.57 | 0.55 | |
| Right Arm | Position | 5.30 | 5.93 | 7.67 | 6.30 |
| Rotation | 0.70 | 0.84 | 1.22 | 0.92 |
| Human Motion Capture | Torso | Left Arm | Right Arm | Head | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pos. | Rot. | Pos. | Rot. | Pos. | Rot. | Rot. | |
| Tracker-free (Ours) | 12.54 | 1.84 | 4.01 | 0.55 | 6.30 | 0.92 | 1.37 |
| PICO + Motion Trackers | 13.16 | 2.06 | 4.12 | 0.57 | 5.63 | 0.81 | 1.23 |
| Task | Strategy | w/o Temporal | Absolute | DexRoam |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resampling | Action | (Ours) | ||
| Pick Chips Can | Cotrain | 0.65 | 0.00 | 0.70 |
| Pretrain + FT | 0.30 | 0.00 | 0.65 | |
| Pretrain + Cotrain FT | 0.20 | 0.00 | 0.90 | |
| Throw Trash | Cotrain | 0.40 | 0.00 | 0.65 |
| Pretrain + FT | 0.50 | 0.00 | 0.55 |
| Component | Metric | Pick Chips Can | Pour Water | Throw Trash | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Torso | Position | 14.76 | 11.50 | 13.22 | 13.16 |
| Rotation | 1.71 | 2.74 | 1.74 | 2.06 | |
| Left Arm | Position | 3.85 | 4.11 | 4.41 | 4.12 |
| Rotation | 0.54 | 0.58 | 0.60 | 0.57 | |
| Right Arm | Position | 5.44 | 5.45 | 6.02 | 5.63 |
| Rotation | 0.79 | 0.79 | 0.85 | 0.81 |
| Task | Data | LDLJ | SPARC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pick Chips Can | Retargeted Human | -20.2802 | -5.8049 |
| Teleoperated Robot | -20.4726 | -7.0548 | |
| Pour Water | Retargeted Human | -20.5962 | -5.9222 |
| Teleoperated Robot | -20.4183 | -6.5718 | |
| Throw Trash | Retargeted Human | -20.8349 | -6.6556 |
| Teleoperated Robot | -20.3022 | -6.9229 |
| Component | Representation | Dim. |
|---|---|---|
| Left arm | 3D Cartesian position + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Right arm | 3D Cartesian position + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Torso | 3D Cartesian position + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Left XHand | Joint feedback | 12 |
| Right XHand | Joint feedback | 12 |
| Active head | Joint state | 2 |
| Component | Representation | Dim. |
|---|---|---|
| Left XHand | Joint target | 12 |
| Right XHand | Joint target | 12 |
| Left arm | Relative translation + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Right arm | Relative translation + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Torso | Relative translation + 6D rotation | 9 |
| Active head | Joint target | 2 |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | |
| Number of GPUs | 2 |
| Maximum training steps | 30,000 |
| Global batch size | 4 |
| Per-GPU batch size | 2 |
| Gradient accumulation steps | 1 |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | NVIDIA Isaac-GR00T N1.7-3B |
| Number of GPUs | 4 |
| Maximum training steps | 40,000 |
| Global batch size | 24 |
| Per-GPU batch size | 6 |
| Gradient accumulation steps | 1 |
| Task | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 | Stage 4 | Stage 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pick Chips Can | Move forward to the table (0.2) | Move the hand into the grasping envelope without knocking over the can, with the fingertip center within 3 cm of the can axis (0.2) | Close the fingers and establish a stable grasp with at least two opposing fingers in contact with the can (0.2) | Lift the can above the table by at least the basket height and maintain the grasp for at least 3 s without slipping (0.2) | Successfully place the can into the basket (0.2) |
| Pour Water | Reach toward the container (0.1) | Establish a stable grasp on the container (0.2) | Lift the container at least 5 cm above the table (0.2) | Move toward the target while maintaining a stable grasp on the container (0.2) | Rotate the wrist and pour water into the target container (0.3) |
| Throw Trash | Move the hand into the grasping envelope of the chips can without knocking it over, with the fingertip center within 3 cm of the can axis (0.2) | Close the fingers and establish a stable grasp with at least two opposing fingers in contact with the object (0.2) | Move the mobile base until the trash bin is within the reachable workspace (0.2) | Release the object such that it falls into the trash bin (0.3) | Complete the task without displacing or knocking over the trash bin (0.1) |
| Deliver Fruit | Move both hands into the grasping envelope and establish contact with the fruit basket (0.2) | Lift the fruit basket at least 5 cm above the supporting surface using coordinated bimanual grasping (0.2) | Maintain the lifted basket for at least 3 s without dropping it (0.2) | Complete the required locomotion and turning while keeping the basket and its contents stable (0.2) | Place the fruit basket at the target location (0.2) |
| Push Chair & Close Laptop | Establish contact between the hand and the back of the chair (0.2) | Successfully push the chair without losing hand–chair contact (0.2) | Move the chair to the specified target position under the table (0.2) | Extend the right hand and successfully reach behind the laptop lid (0.2) | Successfully close the laptop (0.2) |