Phone2Act: A Low-Cost, Hardware-Agnostic Teleoperation System for Scalable VLA Data Collection

TL;DR

Phone2Act is a versatile, low-cost teleoperation system that uses smartphones and ROS 2 to facilitate scalable data collection for training vision-language-action models across various robot platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware-agnostic, modular teleoperation framework with synchronized multi-camera recording and native dataset export, enabling scalable VLA data collection.

Findings

Achieved 90% success rate on a real-world pick-and-place task.

Collected 130 episodes for fine-tuning GR00T-N1.5.

Supports diverse robot platforms without code modification.

Abstract

Collecting diverse, high-quality manipulation data for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model training remains prohibitively expensive for many research groups, as existing teleoperation frameworks rely on specialized hardware or are tightly coupled to specific robot platforms. We present Phone2Act, a low-cost, hardware-agnostic teleoperation framework that transforms a commodity smartphone into a 6-DoF robot controller via Google ARCore. Built on a modular ROS 2 architecture, Phone2Act decouples control logic from hardware specifics through interchangeable bridge nodes, supporting platforms from industrial cobots to low-cost bimanual arms without code modification. A Universal Recorder synchronizes multi-camera RGB streams with robot state feedback and exports demonstrations natively in the LeRobot dataset format, eliminating post-processing and enabling immediate VLA fine-tuning. We validate the framework by fine-tuning GR00T-N1.5 on 130 collected episodes, achieving a 90% success rate on a real-world multi-stage pick-and-place task deployed on a physical Dobot CR5.