English

Phantom: Training Robots Without Robots Using Only Human Videos

Robotics 2026-05-29 v2

Abstract

Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation policies directly from human video demonstrations, requiring no robot data. Our method converts human demonstrations into robot-compatible observation-action pairs using hand pose estimation and visual data editing. We inpaint the human arm and overlay a rendered robot to align the visual domains. This enables zero-shot deployment on real hardware without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate strong success rates-up to 92%-on a range of tasks including deformable object manipulation, multi-object sweeping, and insertion. Our approach generalizes to novel environments and supports closed-loop execution. By demonstrating that effective policies can be trained using only human videos, our method broadens the path to scalable robot learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.00779,
  title  = {Phantom: Training Robots Without Robots Using Only Human Videos},
  author = {Marion Lepert and Jiaying Fang and Jeannette Bohg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.00779},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project website at https://phantom-human-videos.github.io

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:03:29.095Z