Phone2Act: A Low-Cost, Hardware-Agnostic Teleoperation System for Scalable VLA Data Collection
For robotics researchers, this reduces the cost and complexity of collecting manipulation data for VLA model training.
Phone2Act transforms a commodity smartphone into a 6-DoF robot controller for teleoperation, enabling scalable VLA data collection without specialized hardware. Fine-tuning GR00T-N1.5 on 130 collected episodes achieved 90% success on a multi-stage pick-and-place task.
Collecting diverse, high-quality manipulation data for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model training remains prohibitively expensive for many research groups, as existing teleoperation frameworks rely on specialized hardware or are tightly coupled to specific robot platforms. We present Phone2Act, a low-cost, hardware-agnostic teleoperation framework that transforms a commodity smartphone into a 6-DoF robot controller via Google ARCore. Built on a modular ROS 2 architecture, Phone2Act decouples control logic from hardware specifics through interchangeable bridge nodes, supporting platforms from industrial cobots to low-cost bimanual arms without code modification. A Universal Recorder synchronizes multi-camera RGB streams with robot state feedback and exports demonstrations natively in the LeRobot dataset format, eliminating post-processing and enabling immediate VLA fine-tuning. We validate the framework by fine-tuning GR00T-N1.5 on 130 collected episodes, achieving a 90% success rate on a real-world multi-stage pick-and-place task deployed on a physical Dobot CR5.