EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video

Imitation learning for manipulation has a well-known data scarcity problem. Unlike natural language and 2D computer vision, there is no Internet-scale corpus of data for dexterous manipulation. One appealing option is egocentric human video, a passively scalable data source. However, existing large-scale datasets such as Ego4D do not have native hand pose annotations and do not focus on object manipulation. To this end, we use Apple Vision Pro to collect EgoDex: the largest and most diverse dataset of dexterous human manipulation to date. EgoDex has 829 hours of egocentric video with paired 3D hand and finger tracking data collected at the time of recording, where multiple calibrated cameras and on-device SLAM can be used to precisely track the pose of every joint of each hand. The dataset covers a wide range of diverse manipulation behaviors with everyday household objects in 194 different tabletop tasks ranging from tying shoelaces to folding laundry. Furthermore, we train and systematically evaluate imitation learning policies for hand trajectory prediction on the dataset, introducing metrics and benchmarks for measuring progress in this increasingly important area. By releasing this large-scale dataset, we hope to push the frontier of robotics, computer vision, and foundation models.

ARMADA: Augmented Reality for Robot Manipulation and Robot-Free Data Acquisition

Teleoperation for robot imitation learning is bottlenecked by hardware availability. Can high-quality robot data be collected without a physical robot? We present a system for augmenting Apple Vision Pro with real-time virtual robot feedback. By providing users with an intuitive understanding of how their actions translate to robot motions, we enable the collection of natural barehanded human data that is compatible with the limitations of physical robot hardware. We conducted a user study with 15 participants demonstrating 3 different tasks each under 3 different feedback conditions and directly replayed the collected trajectories on physical robot hardware. Results suggest live robot feedback dramatically improves the quality of the collected data, suggesting a new avenue for scalable human data collection without access to robot hardware. Videos and more are available at https://nataliya.dev/armada.