TelePhantom: A User-Friendly Teleoperation System with Virtual Assistance for Enhanced Effectiveness

Dexterous manipulation is a critical area of robotics. In this field, teleoperation faces three key challenges: user-friendliness for novices, safety assurance, and transferability across different platforms. While collecting real robot dexterous manipulation data by teleoperation to train robots has shown impressive results on diverse tasks, due to the morphological differences between human and robot hands, it is not only hard for new users to understand the action mapping but also raises potential safety concerns during operation. To address these limitations, we introduce TelePhantom. This teleoperation system offers real-time visual feedback on robot actions based on human user inputs, with a total hardware cost of less than $1,000. TelePhantom allows the user to see a virtual robot that represents the outcome of the user's next movement. By enabling flexible switching between command visualization and actual execution, this system helps new users learn how to demonstrate quickly and safely. We demonstrate its superiority over other teleoperation systems across five tasks, emphasize its ease of use, and highlight its ease of deployment across diverse input sensors and robotic platforms. We will release our code and a deployment document on our website: https://telephantom.github.io/.

$\mathcal{D(R,O)}$ Grasp: A Unified Representation of Robot and Object Interaction for Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping

Dexterous grasping is a fundamental yet challenging skill in robotic manipulation, requiring precise interaction between robotic hands and objects. In this paper, we present $\mathcal{D(R,O)}$ Grasp, a novel framework that models the interaction between the robotic hand in its grasping pose and the object, enabling broad generalization across various robot hands and object geometries. Our model takes the robot hand's description and object point cloud as inputs and efficiently predicts kinematically valid and stable grasps, demonstrating strong adaptability to diverse robot embodiments and object geometries. Extensive experiments conducted in both simulated and real-world environments validate the effectiveness of our approach, with significant improvements in success rate, grasp diversity, and inference speed across multiple robotic hands. Our method achieves an average success rate of 87.53% in simulation in less than one second, tested across three different dexterous robotic hands. In real-world experiments using the LeapHand, the method also demonstrates an average success rate of 89%. $\mathcal{D(R,O)}$ Grasp provides a robust solution for dexterous grasping in complex and varied environments. The code, appendix, and videos are available on our project website at https://nus-lins-lab.github.io/drograspweb/.

MASQ: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Single Quadruped Robot Locomotion

This paper proposes a novel method to improve locomotion learning for a single quadruped robot using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL). Many existing methods use single-agent reinforcement learning for an individual robot or MARL for the cooperative task in multi-robot systems. Unlike existing methods, this paper proposes using MARL for the locomotion learning of a single quadruped robot. We develop a learning structure called Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Single Quadruped Robot Locomotion (MASQ), considering each leg as an agent to explore the action space of the quadruped robot, sharing a global critic, and learning collaboratively. Experimental results indicate that MASQ not only speeds up learning convergence but also enhances robustness in real-world settings, suggesting that applying MASQ to single robots such as quadrupeds could surpass traditional single-robot reinforcement learning approaches. Our study provides insightful guidance on integrating MARL with single-robot locomotion learning.

Multi-Agent Target Assignment and Path Finding for Intelligent Warehouse: A Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Multi-agent target assignment and path planning (TAPF) are two key problems in intelligent warehouse. However, most literature only addresses one of these two problems separately. In this study, we propose a method to simultaneously solve target assignment and path planning from a perspective of cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to model the TAPF problem for intelligent warehouse to cooperative multi-agent deep RL, and the first to simultaneously address TAPF based on multi-agent deep RL. Furthermore, previous literature rarely considers the physical dynamics of agents. In this study, the physical dynamics of the agents is considered. Experimental results show that our method performs well in various task settings, which means that the target assignment is solved reasonably well and the planned path is almost shortest. Moreover, our method is more time-efficient than baselines.