3 research outputs found
GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulators
Imitation learning from human demonstrations is a powerful framework to teach
robots new skills. However, the performance of the learned policies is
bottlenecked by the quality, scale, and variety of the demonstration data. In
this paper, we aim to lower the barrier to collecting large and high-quality
human demonstration data by proposing GELLO, a general framework for building
low-cost and intuitive teleoperation systems for robotic manipulation. Given a
target robot arm, we build a GELLO controller that has the same kinematic
structure as the target arm, leveraging 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf
motors. GELLO is easy to build and intuitive to use. Through an extensive user
study, we show that GELLO enables more reliable and efficient demonstration
collection compared to commonly used teleoperation devices in the imitation
learning literature such as VR controllers and 3D spacemouses. We further
demonstrate the capabilities of GELLO for performing complex bi-manual and
contact-rich manipulation tasks. To make GELLO accessible to everyone, we have
designed and built GELLO systems for 3 commonly used robotic arms: Franka, UR5,
and xArm. All software and hardware are open-sourced and can be found on our
website: https://wuphilipp.github.io/gello/