RIO: Flexible Real-Time Robot I/O for Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning

TL;DR

RIO is an open source Python framework that simplifies cross-embodiment robot control and data collection, enabling efficient training of vision-language-action models across diverse robot platforms.

Contribution

The paper introduces RIO, a flexible, lightweight, open source framework that abstracts robot control and data workflows across different hardware and morphologies.

Findings

Validated on three robot morphologies and four hardware platforms.

Enabled fine-tuning of state-of-the-art VLAs on household tasks.

Open sourced to facilitate community-driven robot learning.

Abstract

Despite recent efforts to collect multi-task, multi-embodiment datasets, to design recipes for training Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), and to showcase these models on different robot platforms, generalist cross-embodiment robot capabilities remains a largely elusive ideal. Progress is limited by fragmented infrastructure: most robot code is highly specific to the exact setup the user decided on, which adds major overhead when attempting to reuse, recycle, or share artifacts between users. We present RIO (Robot I/O), an open source Python framework that provides flexible, lightweight components for robot control, teleoperation, data formatting, sensor configuration, and policy deployment across diverse hardware platforms and morphologies. RIO provides abstractions that enable users to make any choice and to switch between them, with minimal reconfiguration effort. We validate RIO on VLA deployment workflows across three morphologies (single-arm, bimanual, humanoid) and four hardware platforms with varying grippers and cameras. Using teleoperated data collected with RIO, we fine-tune state-of-the-art VLAs including $\pi_{0.5}$ and GR00T on household tasks such as pick-and-place, folding, and bowl scrubbing. By open sourcing all our efforts, we hope the community can accelerate their pace of robot learning on real-world robot hardware. Additional details at: https://robot-i-o.github.io