RoboWheel: A Data Engine from Real-World Human Demonstrations for Cross-Embodiment Robotic Learning

TL;DR

RoboWheel converts human interaction videos into versatile, cross-embodiment robotic training data using a novel reconstruction and retargeting pipeline, validated on vision-language and imitation learning tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline for transforming human demonstration videos into scalable, cross-embodiment robotic training data with physical plausibility and domain randomization.

Findings

Trajectories are as stable as teleoperation data.

Comparable performance gains in imitation learning.

First quantitative evidence of HOI as effective supervision.

Abstract

We introduce Robowheel, a data engine that converts human hand object interaction (HOI) videos into training-ready supervision for cross morphology robotic learning. From monocular RGB or RGB-D inputs, we perform high precision HOI reconstruction and enforce physical plausibility via a reinforcement learning (RL) optimizer that refines hand object relative poses under contact and penetration constraints. The reconstructed, contact rich trajectories are then retargeted to cross-embodiments, robot arms with simple end effectors, dexterous hands, and humanoids, yielding executable actions and rollouts. To scale coverage, we build a simulation-augmented framework on Isaac Sim with diverse domain randomization (embodiments, trajectories, object retrieval, background textures, hand motion mirroring), which enriches the distributions of trajectories and observations while preserving spatial relationships and physical plausibility. The entire data pipeline forms an end to end pipeline from video,reconstruction,retargeting,augmentation data acquisition. We validate the data on mainstream vision language action (VLA) and imitation learning architectures, demonstrating that trajectories produced by our pipeline are as stable as those from teleoperation and yield comparable continual performance gains. To our knowledge, this provides the first quantitative evidence that HOI modalities can serve as effective supervision for robotic learning. Compared with teleoperation, Robowheel is lightweight, a single monocular RGB(D) camera is sufficient to extract a universal, embodiment agnostic motion representation that could be flexibly retargeted across embodiments. We further assemble a large scale multimodal dataset combining multi-camera captures, monocular videos, and public HOI corpora for training and evaluating embodied models.