UniBiDex: A Unified Teleoperation Framework for Robotic Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation

TL;DR

UniBiDex is a versatile teleoperation framework enabling real-time, contact-rich bimanual robotic manipulation using various input modalities, with improved safety, smoothness, and robustness validated on complex tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a unified control framework supporting multiple input types with nullspace control for safe, smooth, and efficient bimanual manipulation, and provides open-source tools for data collection.

Findings

Higher task success rates in complex manipulation tasks

Smoother trajectories and improved robustness

Effective integration of heterogeneous input devices

Abstract

We present UniBiDex a unified teleoperation framework for robotic bimanual dexterous manipulation that supports both VRbased and leaderfollower input modalities UniBiDex enables realtime contactrich dualarm teleoperation by integrating heterogeneous input devices into a shared control stack with consistent kinematic treatment and safety guarantees The framework employs nullspace control to optimize bimanual configurations ensuring smooth collisionfree and singularityaware motion across tasks We validate UniBiDex on a longhorizon kitchentidying task involving five sequential manipulation subtasks demonstrating higher task success rates smoother trajectories and improved robustness compared to strong baselines By releasing all hardware and software components as opensource we aim to lower the barrier to collecting largescale highquality human demonstration datasets and accelerate progress in robot learning.