Teleoperation
UMI (Universal Manipulation Interface)
UMI (Universal Manipulation Interface) is a handheld, robot-free data collection system introduced by Chi et al. in 2024, consisting of a portable gripper with a wrist-mounted GoPro fisheye camera that records manipulation demonstrations anywhere a person can carry it. Its SLAM-based pose recovery, wide-view observations, and latency-matched policy interface let demonstrations collected in the wild transfer to real robot arms, with the follow-up Mobile UMI extending the recipe to whole-body mobile manipulation.
Why it matters for physical AI
Decoupling demonstration collection from robot hardware removes a principal bottleneck in scaling manipulation datasets, letting data grow at the pace of people with handheld devices rather than instrumented robot cells.
Build physical AI
Put these concepts to work on real hardware
Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.