AirExo

A low-cost bimanual exoskeleton from Shanghai Jiao Tong's Cewu Lu group that can both teleoperate a robot and collect data without one.

AirExo is an open-source bimanual exoskeleton proposed by Cewu Lu's group at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in September 2023, published at ICRA 2024. A person wears it on both arms; the exoskeleton's joints correspond one-to-one with the robot's joints, so it can do joint-level teleoperation, and it can also be worn away from the robot to record “in-the-wild” demonstrations directly in real environments. Its structural parts can all be 3D-printed, costing about $300 per arm, originally designed for a Flexiv Rizon dual-arm setup but adaptable to UR5, Franka, and others. AirExo-2 (CoRL 2025) adds a vision adapter that converts footage of a person wearing the exoskeleton into “pseudo-robot demonstrations,” paired with a policy called RISE-2 that fuses 3D point clouds with 2D semantic features; using no real-robot data at all, it approaches the performance of a policy trained on teleoperation data. The official cost is about $600 per full kit, compared with roughly $60,000 for a teleoperation platform.

ExampleIn the AirExo paper's experiments, a policy trained on just 3 minutes of teleoperation demonstrations plus a large amount of in-the-wild exoskeleton demonstrations matched or exceeded one trained on more than 20 minutes of teleoperation data alone.

Also called

AirExo-2

Related

Exoskeleton Teleoperation · Robot-free (Embodiment-free) Data Collection · Leader-Follower Teleoperation · In-the-wild Data · SJTU MVIG Lab · Flexiv Rizon

Sources

AirExo: Low-Cost Exoskeletons for Learning Whole-Arm Manipulation in the Wild (arXiv 2309.14975)
AirExo 项目主页 (Chinese)
AirExo-2 项目主页 (Chinese)

As of

2025-09