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

TL;DR

TelePreview is an affordable, user-friendly teleoperation system that uses virtual arm assistance and real-time visual feedback to improve safety, transferability, and ease of learning for robot manipulation tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces TelePreview, a novel teleoperation system with virtual arm assistance that enhances usability, safety, and platform transferability for robot data collection.

Findings

Outperforms existing systems on five tasks

Enables quick and safe learning for new users

Supports deployment across diverse robotic platforms

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. We release our code and a deployment document on our website https://nus-lins-lab.github.io/telepreview-web/.