🎉Excited to share a fun little hardware project we’ve been working on. GELLO is an intuitive and low cost teleoperation device for robot arms that costs less than $300. We've seen the importance of data quality in imitation learning. Our goal is to make this more accessible 1/n

GELLO is a scaled, kinematically equivalent version of a given arm. The equivalence allows a user to directly control the joints of the arm by controlling GELLO. The user can feel the kinematic constraints of the robot, making it more intuitive to control. 2/n

We show that you can build such a specialized kinematically equivalent controller economically by leveraging off-the-shelf servos and 3D printed parts. We instantiate GELLO for 3 different robot arms that are commonly used in the community, the a) UR5, b) xArm7, and c) Panda 3/n

How does GELLO compare against other common teleoperation devices? We conduct a user study with 12 participants across 5 tasks on our bimanual UR5 station. Here are the tasks we explore in our user study, which cover a range of manipulation challenges 4/n

We find that using GELLO results in a higher success rate when compared to spacemouses or VR controllers. 5/n

We also find that users complete tasks faster when using GELLO. This could mean more successful trajectories in your data collection pipelines! 6/n

Checkout the project website and arxiv paper to learn more. Code and hardware release is coming soon! Huge thanks to my collaborators Fred Shentu, Zhongke Yi, @Xingyu2017 , and @pabbeel! Website: Arxiv: 7/n

Many researchers may be interested in directly purchasing a GELLO for their robot rather than building their own. I’m trying to gauge interest in via this form: Please fill it out if the project interests you! 8/n

's ALOHA was definitely an inspiration for this project. I began to wonder, can I get similar fine-grained capabilities for the robots I have in lab? Definitely go checkout Tony’s paper as well! 9/n

Here are a few more fun videos. GELLO is effective in bimanual configurations. Here we make some ramen! 10/n

We can also use GELLO for fine-grained manipulation tasks like extracting some floss. 11/n

Different robots have different advantages and capabilities. For example, the Franka can do impedance control, making it easier to use for tasks such as whiteboard erasing. 12/n

Don’t forget to check out the website for more videos! 13/n