Abstract:Teleoperation is a key interface for controlling dexterous robotic hands and collecting demonstrations for imitation learning. Its effectiveness largely depends on kinematic retargeting, which maps operator hand motions to feasible and intuitive robot hand motions. Existing methods often require hand-crafted objectives, precise calibration, or global shape matching between human and robot hand spaces, making them sensitive to hand-specific tuning and less reliable across different dexterous hands. We propose AnyDexRT, a calibration-free retargeting method for intuitive dexterous teleoperation across human-like dexterous hands. AnyDexRT combines self-supervised fingertip correspondence learning with few-shot human guidance to anchor the mapping in task-relevant regions, and further refines pinch-related poses using a contact classifier. Experiments on diverse dexterous hands and real-world teleoperation tasks show that AnyDexRT improves retargeting quality, reduces manual tuning, and provides more intuitive and efficient control than prior retargeting methods. Project website: https://chenxi-wang.github.io/projects/anydexrt
Abstract:Scaling up imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and cost-effective demonstration collection methods. Current teleoperation approaches, though effective, are expensive and inefficient due to the dependency on physical robot platforms. Alternative data sources like in-the-wild demonstrations can eliminate the need for physical robots and offer more scalable solutions. However, existing in-the-wild data collection devices have limitations: handheld devices offer restricted in-hand camera observation, while whole-body devices often require fine-tuning with robot data due to action inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose AirExo-2, a low-cost exoskeleton system for large-scale in-the-wild demonstration collection. By introducing the demonstration adaptor to transform the collected in-the-wild demonstrations into pseudo-robot demonstrations, our system addresses key challenges in utilizing in-the-wild demonstrations for downstream imitation learning in real-world environments. Additionally, we present RISE-2, a generalizable policy that integrates 2D and 3D perceptions, outperforming previous imitation learning policies in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, even with limited demonstrations. By leveraging in-the-wild demonstrations collected and transformed by the AirExo-2 system, without the need for additional robot demonstrations, RISE-2 achieves comparable or superior performance to policies trained with teleoperated data, highlighting the potential of AirExo-2 for scalable and generalizable imitation learning. Project page: https://airexo.tech/airexo2
Abstract:Generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly when scaling to new environments with limited demonstrations. This paper introduces CAGE, a novel robotic manipulation policy designed to overcome these generalization barriers by integrating a causal attention mechanism. CAGE utilizes the powerful feature extraction capabilities of the vision foundation model DINOv2, combined with LoRA fine-tuning for robust environment understanding. The policy further employs a causal Perceiver for effective token compression and a diffusion-based action prediction head with attention mechanisms to enhance task-specific fine-grained conditioning. With as few as 50 demonstrations from a single training environment, CAGE achieves robust generalization across diverse visual changes in objects, backgrounds, and viewpoints. Extensive experiments validate that CAGE significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art RGB/RGB-D approaches in various manipulation tasks, especially under large distribution shifts. In similar environments, CAGE offers an average of 42% increase in task completion rate. While all baselines fail to execute the task in unseen environments, CAGE manages to obtain a 43% completion rate and a 51% success rate in average, making a huge step towards practical deployment of robots in real-world settings. Project website: cage-policy.github.io.