OpenVR: Teleoperation for Manipulation
This addresses the bottleneck of demonstration collection in robotics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VR teleoperation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of collecting high-quality robot demonstrations by introducing OpenVR, a VR teleoperation method using consumer hardware to control a robot, making it open source, easy to use, and adaptable to various setups.
Across the robotics field, quality demonstrations are an integral part of many control pipelines. However, collecting high-quality demonstration trajectories remains time-consuming and difficult, often resulting in the number of demonstrations being the performance bottleneck. To address this issue, we present a method of Virtual Reality (VR) Teleoperation that uses an Oculus VR headset to teleoperate a Franka Emika Panda robot. Although other VR teleoperation methods exist, our code is open source, designed for readily available consumer hardware, easy to modify, agnostic to experimental setup, and simple to use.