TeleDex: Accessible Dexterous Teleoperation
About
Despite increasing dataset scale and model capacity, robot manipulation policies still struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. As a result, deploying state-of-the-art policies in new environments, tasks, or robot embodiments often requires collecting additional demonstrations. Enabling this in real-world deployment settings requires tools that allow users to collect demonstrations quickly, affordably, and with minimal setup. We present TeleDex, an open-source system for intuitive teleoperation of dexterous hands and robotic manipulators using any readily available phone. The system streams low-latency 6-DoF wrist poses and articulated 21-DoF hand state estimates from the phone, which are retargeted to robot arms and multi-fingered hands without requiring external tracking infrastructure. TeleDex supports both a handheld phone-only mode and an optional 3D-printable hand-mounted interface for finger-level teleoperation. By lowering the hardware and setup barriers to dexterous teleoperation, TeleDex enables users to quickly collect demonstrations during deployment to support policy fine-tuning. We evaluate the system across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness as a unified scalable interface for robot teleoperation. All software and hardware designs, along with demonstration videos, are open-source and available at orayyan.com/teledex.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cup Stacking | User Study | Success Rate33 | 3 | |
| Page Flipping | User Study | Success Rate51 | 3 | |
| Piano Playing | User Study | Success Rate60 | 3 | |
| Scissors Cutting | User Study | Success Rate0.00e+0 | 3 | |
| 6 Pick and Place | Dexterous Manipulation User Study RealMan Platform (successful trials) | Completion Time (s)74 | 2 | |
| Egg Container Opening and Picking | Dexterous Manipulation User Study RealMan Platform (successful trials) | Completion Time (s)18.7 | 2 | |
| Targeted Piano Key Pressing | Dexterous Manipulation User Study RealMan Platform (successful trials) | Completion Time (s)75.8 | 2 |