Failure-Aware Bimanual Teleoperation via Conservative Value Guided Assistance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conservative value-guided assistance framework for bimanual teleoperation that enhances task success and safety by estimating failure risk from offline data and providing adaptive haptic guidance.

Contribution

It presents a novel failure-aware teleoperation method using Conservative Value Learning to model task feasibility and regulate assistance without overriding human control.

Findings

Improved task success rates in contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Reduced operator workload compared to baseline methods.

Effective embedding of failure awareness into teleoperation control.

Abstract

Teleoperation of high-precision manipulation is con-strained by tight success tolerances and complex contact dy-namics, which make impending failures difficult for human operators to anticipate under partial observability. This paper proposes a value-guided, failure-aware framework for bimanual teleoperation that provides compliant haptic assistance while pre-serving continuous human authority. The framework is trained entirely from heterogeneous offline teleoperation data containing both successful and failed executions. Task feasibility is mod-eled as a conservative success score learned via Conservative Value Learning, yielding a risk-sensitive estimate that remains reliable under distribution shift. During online operation, the learned success score regulates the level of assistance, while a learned actor provides a corrective motion direction. Both are integrated through a joint-space impedance interface on the master side, yielding continuous guidance that steers the operator away from failure-prone actions without overriding intent. Experimental results on contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrate improved task success rates and reduced operator workload compared to conventional teleoperation and shared-autonomy baselines, indicating that conservative value learning provides an effective mechanism for embedding failure awareness into bilateral teleoperation. Experimental videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDTsvzEkDRE