English

Towards Human-level Dexterous Teleoperation

Robotics 2026-07-13 v1

Abstract

Humans routinely wield tools, swap grasps, and reposition objects within a single hand, seamlessly orchestrating contact transitions that span translation, reorientation, and finger gaiting. Endowing robot dexterous hands with this level of in-hand dexterity through teleoperation requires precise control of object motion via dynamic hand-object contact, yet current teleoperation systems remain far from this capability. To bridge this gap, we take a major step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation by introducing TeleDexter, a hand-object co-tracking controller that maps operator intent into learned, low-level contact execution. The controller is trained on consecutive co-tracking subgoals derived from human reference motions, utilizing a hybrid reward that couples sparse subgoal objectives with dense tracking rewards to enable learning across diverse interaction modalities rather than frame-wise trajectory imitation. The entire pipeline requires only single-stage RL and, with random action masking and domain randomization, transfers zero-shot to the real robot. We evaluate TeleDexter on seven challenging dexterous teleoperation tasks spanning object reorientation and long-horizon tool use across two dexterous hands, achieving a 75% average success rate where all baselines consistently fail. Furthermore, the collected demonstrations successfully train autonomous policies via behavioral cloning, marking a concrete step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.11481,
  title  = {Towards Human-level Dexterous Teleoperation},
  author = {Puhao Li and Zeyuan Chen and Yingying Wu and Pengkun Wei and Yuyang Li and Tianyu Wang and Jiaxiao Shi and Mingrui Yu and Baoxiong Jia and Song-chun Zhu and Tengyu Liu and Siyuan Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.11481},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project Website: https://bigai-dex.github.io/blog/teledexter/