TelePreview: A User-Friendly Teleoperation System with Virtual Arm Assistance for Enhanced Effectiveness

Anonymous Authors

Abstract

Teleoperation provides an effective way to collect robot data, which is crucial for learning from demonstrations. In this field, teleoperation faces several key challenges: user-friendliness for new users, safety assurance, and transferability across different platforms. While collecting real robot dexterous manipulation data by teleoperation to train robots has shown impressive results on diverse tasks, due to the morphological differences between human and robot hands, it is not only hard for new users to understand the action mapping but also raises potential safety concerns during operation. To address these limitations, we introduce TelePreview. This teleoperation system offers real-time visual feedback on robot actions based on human user inputs, with a total hardware cost of less than $1,000. TelePreview allows the user to see a virtual robot that represents the outcome of the user's next movement. By enabling flexible switching between command visualization and actual execution, this system helps new users learn how to demonstrate quickly and safely. We demonstrate that it outperforms other teleoperation systems across five tasks, emphasize its ease of use, and highlight its straightforward deployment across diverse robotic platforms.

Overview of TelePreview teaser

Framework Overview

Overview of TelePreview framework image
Overview of the TelePreview System Architecture: Our system consists of three main components: (1) Various input devices, including RGB-D cameras, IMU mocap suits, VR headsets, mocap gloves, AR hand tracking, and EMG armbands for capturing human motion; (2) A central processing pipeline that uses SMPL-X as a standard to process wrist and hand pose data, feeding into our Preview System with joint-to-joint mapping and a non-collision retargeting network; (3) Support for different robot platforms as output devices for executing the mapped movements.

Pipeline Overview

Overview of TelePreview Pipeline image
Pipeline of Our Module: The system tracks user wrist and hand poses, maps them to robot joint configurations through joint-to-joint mapping and non-collision retargeting, and provides visual preview before physical execution. We achieve precise alignment between virtual and physical robots through AprilTag calibration.

Task Videos

Box Rotation
Cup Stack
Hang
Pick & Place
Pour

Long-horizon Video

BibTeX

TODO