Exoskeleton Teleoperation

The operator wears an exoskeleton matching the robot's joints, controlling it directly with their own arm motion.

Exoskeleton teleoperation is a form of teleoperation: the operator wears an exoskeleton whose joints each carry an encoder (a sensor that measures rotation angle), built with the same structure as the robot's arm, or a proportionally matched one. However the person's arm moves, the readings map straight onto the robot's joint angles, with no need to first solve inverse kinematics (working backward from end-effector pose to joint angles) the way a VR controller requires. The benefits are that the whole arm's pose is controllable, latency is low, it feels intuitive, and it can also be used disconnected from any robot to collect data “in the wild”; the drawbacks are that the structure has to be adapted to each robot, and wearing it for a long time is tiring. Notable examples include Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Cewu Lu group's AirExo family of bimanual exoskeletons, and HOMIE, a 2025 exoskeleton cockpit for humanoid robots.

ExampleIn the AirExo paper, a policy trained on just 3 minutes of teleoperation data plus a large amount of in-the-wild exoskeleton demonstrations matched or exceeded the performance of a policy trained on more than 20 minutes of teleoperation data alone; the full HOMIE cockpit costs about $500.

Also called

Exoskeleton Collection

Related

Teleoperation · Leader-Follower Teleoperation · Whole-Body Teleoperation · AirExo · HOMIE · Exoskeleton

Sources

AirExo: Low-Cost Exoskeletons for Learning Whole-Arm Manipulation in the Wild (arXiv 2309.14975)
HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit (arXiv 2502.13013)

As of

2025-04