RoboSpan: Learning Modular Coordination Policies for High-DoF Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation with Teleoperation
Authors: Keqiang Ren, Xuecheng Ye, Hanyu Liu, Zhihua Wang, Tao Jian, Yunsheng Ma, Jiayi Wen, Xinran Li, Zhigong Song
Organizations: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China.
Whole-body mobile manipulation suffers from two fundamental challenges: inherent motion heterogeneity across locomotion, arm, and hand modules, and progressive error accumulation over long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Existing teleoperation platforms also lack integrated dexterous tactile sensing to support coordinated whole-body decision-making. This paper presents RoboSpan, a high-DoF whole-body teleoperation and demonstration platform, and the Hierarchical Modular Framework (HMF) for learning modular coordination policies. HMF functionally decouples the 29-DoF action space into fine hand manipulation, arm pose adjustment, and mobile-base spatial configuration branches, and introduces the Coordinated Modular Embodied Transformer (COMET) with inter-modular cross-attention to enable dynamic information exchange and action coordination. Vision-language model driven hierarchical task decomposition structurally suppresses temporal error propagation, while a full-palm 2D tactile representation encodes distributed contact signals for cross-module tactile empowerment. Experiments on a physical 29-DoF robot demonstrate that the proposed method achieves over 20% higher task success rate than mainstream baselines across a range of long-horizon whole-body tasks, markedly improving stability and robustness in contact-rich manipulation.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the RoboSpan framework for high-DoF whole-body mobile manipulation. RoboSpan integrates whole-body teleoperation, multimodal perception, and modular policy learning, enabling VLM-guided hierarchical task decomposition and coordinated Hand–Arm–Mobile execution for long-horizon manipulation.
Teleop System
Interaction Interface
Bimanual
D-Handl
Elevation
Whole-Body Teleop
Wild
AnyTeleop [ 22 ]
Vision-based teleoperation
×
✓
×
×
×
Open-TeleVision [ 18 ]
VR Arm-Hand Teleop
✓
✓
×
×
×
OPEN TEACH [ 19 ]
VR Arm-Hand Teleop
✓
✓
×
×
×
Mobile ALOHA [ 20 ]
Leader arms + backdrivable base
✓
×
✓
✓
×
BEHAVIOR Robot Suite [ 21 ]
Twin arms + controllers
✓
×
×
✓
×
Dexora [ 23 ]
VR Hand Teleop + Exo-Teleop
✓
✓
×
×
×
TABLE I: COMPARISON OF EXISTING ROBOT TELEOPERATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 2: RoboSpan teleoperation demonstration.
Fig. 3: The dexterous hand and full-palm distributed tactile sensing across diverse objects (I–VIII), together with the corresponding tactile maps.
Fig. 4: Overall network architecture of HMF, which consists of three core modules—Hand, Arm, and Mobile—each with a dedicated encoder/decoder and coupled through cross-policy context fusion (IMCA) under VLM-driven multi-stage decomposition.
Method
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Average
ACT
48
40
36
41.3
DP U-Net
40
28
26
31.3
Modular ACT
42
33
30
34.1
COMET
52
46
42
46.7
HMF (Ours)
60
54
50
54.7
TABLE II: Ablation study of task decomposition and modular strategy in the HMF framework (%)
Method
Desktop Organization (3000 time steps)
Trash Cleaning (3000 time steps)
Forward
Grasp Tape
Grasp Bowl
Put
Close
Back
Grasp Cup
Grasp Paper
Move
Lift
Put
ACT [ 33 ]
100%
54%
36%
18%
6%
4%
56%
44%
26%
24%
10%
DP U-Net [ 34 ]
100%
32%
18%
6%
0%
0%
30%
14%
0%
0%
0%
HMF(Ours)
100%
76%
68%
60%
48%
46%
72%
68%
54%
52%
50%
TABLE III: Stage-wise success rate on whole-body mobile manipulation tasks
Fig. 5: Qualitative comparison between ACT (top row) and the proposed HMF (bottom row) on real whole-body mobile manipulation tasks; HMF improves performance by referencing the tactile module for perceptual coordination.
Method
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Average
ACT w/o t
40
66
48
51.3
ACT + t
44
70
50
54.7
Modular ACT + t
36
60
44
46.7
COMET (Ours)
48
76
60
61.3
TABLE IV: Ablation of distributed tactile sensing and modular coordination in contact-rich manipulation tasks(%)
Fig. 6: Impact of RoboSpan on task performance. (a) Success rate vs. task duration during data collection. (b) Average success rate at the data-collection and robot-inference stages.
Executing contact-rich tasks efficiently requires the seamless integration of whole-body coordination and physical compliance regulation. However, existing teleoperation and data-collection frameworks often overlook the joint consideration of multimodal perception and coordinated whole-body operation. This limitation can reduce the efficiency and quality of demonstration collection, thereby affecting the effectiveness of downstream policy learning. In this work, we present M3-Tele: A Unified Multimodal Teleoperational Framework for Compliant Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation, enabling stable physical interaction and capturing aligned visual, tactile, force, and proprioceptive observations during task execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves contact-rich teleoperation performance. The proposed controller reduces the force tracking error from 4.132N to 0.346N, the contact loss from 2.46 to 0.02 events per trial and the tactile deformation error by 65%. User studies across four mobile manipulation tasks also verify the reliability and usability of the proposed system. Furthermore, Diffusion Policy experiments highlight the value of joint tactile and force sensing.
Hengxiang Chen, Shenwen Deng, Yujian Ma +3
Arbeit Gruppe Dexterous Robotics Lab, Shenzhen Technology University, China
Dexterous teleoperation requires precise arm-hand coordination, low-latency feedback, and robust interaction in real-world contact-rich environments. This paper presents a modular bilateral teleoperation framework that integrates operator-side input interfaces with a robot-side dexterous hand and compliant robotic arm in a unified control architecture. The system supports position-based hand retargeting, differential arm control, multi-scale haptic feedback, and shared control for stable manipulation. We validate the framework through a real-world dexterous manipulation task, highlighting coordinated arm-hand control and contact-aware interaction. Beyond feasibility, we identify key design insights related to cross-embodiment mismatch, haptic feedback granularity, and shared control. The proposed platform provides a practical teleoperation system and a foundation for collecting high-quality demonstrations for future learning-from-demonstration research.
Stefano Dalla Gasperina, Dong Ho Kang, Haiyun Zhang +10
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA · Sony Group Corporation, Tokyo, Japan · Meta Reality Labs Research, Redmond, WA, USA
Whole-body teleoperation is essential for scalable robot data collection in loco-manipulation tasks, yet existing approaches relying on exoskeleton suits or multi-camera setups impose prohibitive cost, complexity, and environmental constraints. Recent methods using a single extended reality (XR) device with end-to-end reinforcement learning policies partially address these limitations but require robot-specific retraining, suffer from out-of-distribution failures, and rely on motion retargeting that neglects dynamic feasibility. We propose a hierarchical whole-body teleoperation framework driven by a single XR device that generalizes across diverse robot morphologies without retraining robot-specific policies. A Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based motion retargeter jointly optimizes alignment with the operator's intent and the robot's dynamic feasibility, generating optimal commands for existing low-level controllers. To ensure robust online execution, we introduce a state synchronization method that resets the simulator state at each MPC step to handle noisy real-world measurements and contact sensitivity, and integrate SLAM-based global pose feedback to mitigate long-term drift. Simulation results show higher success rates on whole-body control tasks for both a humanoid (over 30% lower completion time and 20% lower power consumption) and a mobile manipulator (zero collisions) compared to baselines. Real-world experiments further validate the effectiveness and flexibility of our method, demonstrating the successful deployment of the proposed retargeter on both platforms for whole-body control tasks and the ease of allowing users to adjust teleoperation behavior based on their preferences. This plug-and-play framework offers a scalable, morphology-agnostic solution for whole-body robot teleoperation, enabling real-time behavioral customization and broad applicability across platforms.
Jen-Wei Wang, Sarthak Kaingade, Andrea Tagliabue +1