Improving Low-Cost Teleoperation: Augmenting GELLO with Force
This work addresses the problem of enhancing teleoperation for dexterous manipulation tasks, particularly for users in robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing system.
The authors extended the low-cost GELLO teleoperation system by adding force feedback for user interaction and incorporating force data into imitation learning models, resulting in improved user preference and increased task success rates on most manipulation tasks.
In this work we extend the low-cost GELLO teleoperation system, initially designed for joint position control, with additional force information. Our first extension is to implement force feedback, allowing users to feel resistance when interacting with the environment. Our second extension is to add force information into the data collection process and training of imitation learning models. We validate our additions by implementing these on a GELLO system with a Franka Panda arm as the follower robot, performing a user study, and comparing the performance of policies trained with and without force information on a range of simulated and real dexterous manipulation tasks. Qualitatively, users with robotics experience preferred our controller, and the addition of force inputs improved task success on the majority of tasks.