Scalable, Intuitive, Mixed Reality-Based Semi-Autonomous Robotic Telemanipulation for the Execution of a Fine-Grained Bimanual Task
Authors: Shifei Duan, Zhe Wang, Francesco De Pace, Minas Liarokapis
Organizations: New Dexterity research group, The University of Auckland, New Zealand · Competence Industry Manufacturing 4.0 (CIM4.0), Turin, Italy · National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Nowadays, robotic telemanipulation enables humans to control robots so as to execute tasks in a manner similar to how they perform them, and serves as an essential approach for collecting on-robot data for robot learning by human demonstrations. The quality of collected demonstrations directly impacts the performance of the learned policy. However, existing telemanipulation systems rely heavily on human operation, particularly for large-scale data collection. Collecting dozens or hundreds of demonstrations is a demanding process, as operators tend to fatigue quickly, especially during the execution of dexterous tasks that require sustained concentration. Recently, semi-autonomous robotic telemanipulation has emerged as a promising direction that reduces operator workload while preserving human-in-the-loop control for task execution. We therefore introduce a scalable, intuitive, semi-autonomous robotic telemanipulation system that leverages a mixed reality (MR) headset for on-robot data collection. The system autonomously executes the majority of the task trajectories and only requires the operator to make fine adjustments at key stages. We validate the effectiveness of our system by collecting data and training imitation learning policies on the execution of a high-precision, fine-grained bimanual peg-in-hole task. With lower data collection effort, our system obtains high-quality demonstrations that can be used to train fully autonomous task execution policies.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Subfig. a) The bimanual robotic system executing the fine-grained manipulation task. Subfig. b) A user wearing the MR headset during the collection of on-robot demonstrations, using the hands for robot control.
Fig. 2: The framework architecture of the MR-based robotic telemanipulation.
Fig. 3: Overview of the imitation learning pipeline integrating with a semi-autonomous telemanipulation system.
Fig. 4: Visualization of the MR environment from the user’s perspective.
Fig. 5: Full demonstration of the execution of the selected bimanual, fine-grained, peg-in-hole task.
Fig. 6: Enclosure and connector used for the execution of the task.
Fig. 7: Adjusting the robot end-effector pose via the TEC strategy.
Hyperparameter
Value
Learning rate
1e-5
Batch size
8
KL weight
10
Feedforward dimension
3200
Hidden dimension
512
Chunk size
50
TABLE I: Hyperparameters of ACT
Failures
Trials
Overall
Insertion
Avg. Time
Grasp (E / C / B) ∗
Insert
(Success / Total)
Success Rate
Success Rate
(s)
CT (Baseline)
0 / 1 / 0
7
30/38
0.78
0.81
35.5±7.21
Hybrid Telemanipulation
1 / 2 / 3
3
30/39
0.77
0.91
36.5±5.14
Trajectory Execution Control
0 / 2 / 3
0
30/35
0.86
1.00
41.3±4.81
TABLE II: Records of Successes, Failures, and Average Execution Time in Data Collection
Failures
Trials
Overall
Insertion
Avg. Time
Grasp (E / C / B) ∗
Insert
(Success / Total)
Success Rate
Success Rate
(s)
CT (Baseline)
4 / 4 / 5
16
1/30
0.03
0.06
64.13±12.18
Hybrid Telemanipulation
0 / 3 / 0
7
20/30
0.67
0.74
52.7±7.17
Trajectory Execution Control
0 / 2 / 2
3
23/30
0.77
0.88
53.8±6.39
TABLE III: Performance of the Learned Policies during Inference: Successes, Failures, and Execution Time
Robot teleoperation studies how people remotely control robots through interfaces, sensing, feedback, and autonomy, despite distance, delay, and embodiment gaps.
Large scale, diverse demonstration data for manipulation tasks remains a major challenge in learning-based robot policies. Existing in-the-wild data collection approaches often rely on vision-based pose estimation of hand-held grippers or gloves, which introduces an embodiment gap between the collection platform and the target robot. Teleoperation systems eliminate the embodiment gap, but are typically impractical to deploy outside the laboratory environment. We propose TRIP-Bag (Teleoperation, Recording, Intelligence in a Portable Bag), a portable, puppeteer-style teleoperation system fully contained within a commercial suitcase, as a practical solution for collecting high-fidelity manipulation data across varied settings. With a setup time of under five minutes and direct joint-to-joint teleoperation, TRIP-Bag enables rapid and reliable data collection in any environment. We validated TRIP-Bag's usability through experiments with non-expert users, showing that the system is intuitive and easy to operate. Furthermore, we confirmed the quality of the collected data by training benchmark manipulation policies, demonstrating its value as a practical resource for robot learning.
Noboru Myers, Sankalp Yamsani, Obin Kwon +1
KIMLAB (Kinetic Intelligent Machine LAB), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA
Despite increasing dataset scale and model capacity, robot manipulation policies still struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. As a result, deploying state-of-the-art policies in new environments, tasks, or robot embodiments often requires collecting additional demonstrations. Enabling this in real-world deployment settings requires tools that allow users to collect demonstrations quickly, affordably, and with minimal setup. We present TeleDex, an open-source system for intuitive teleoperation of dexterous hands and robotic manipulators using any readily available phone. The system streams low-latency 6-DoF wrist poses and articulated 21-DoF hand state estimates from the phone, which are retargeted to robot arms and multi-fingered hands without requiring external tracking infrastructure. TeleDex supports both a handheld phone-only mode and an optional 3D-printable hand-mounted interface for finger-level teleoperation. By lowering the hardware and setup barriers to dexterous teleoperation, TeleDex enables users to quickly collect demonstrations during deployment to support policy fine-tuning. We evaluate the system across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness as a unified scalable interface for robot teleoperation. All software and hardware designs, along with demonstration videos, are open-source and available at orayyan.com/teledex.
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.
Rui Zhou, Yibo Yuan, Junkai Zhao +4
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · Beihang University +2