Teleoperation Capture

Teleoperation capture is the collection of human-guided robot demonstrations, an operator drives the robot while synchronized sensors record observations, actions, and outcomes, for imitation learning and policy fine-tuning. Operant runs teleoperation programs around your action space, camera setup, and quality bar, with operator diversity, calibration, and QA gates agreed up front. You get demonstrations matched to your robot, not generic trajectories with a mismatched action space.

When teleop is the right method

Teleoperation is the right method when you need expert demonstrations in your robot's action space, particularly for contact-rich manipulation, dexterous tasks, or behaviors that are difficult to script autonomously. It is the workhorse of imitation learning data collection, and it pairs well with targeted edge-case capture for recovery behaviors.

Action-space design

The action space, what the operator controls and how it maps to the robot, is the most consequential decision in a teleoperation program. We align on it during scoping so demonstrations transfer cleanly to training. Mismatched action spaces are a leading cause of policies that look fine in training and fail on hardware.

Camera and sensor setup

We design and calibrate the camera rig, typically multi-camera RGB-D, alongside proprioception and control streams, with extrinsic and intrinsic calibration captured as deliverables. Time synchronization is handled through our multi-sensor synchronization service so observations and actions correspond exactly.

QA and operator diversity

Quality comes from process. We set time-sync tolerances, metadata completeness checks, and operator diversity targets, then track operator identity and scene variation so the dataset generalizes. A calibration pilot validates the full pipeline before scaling.

Deliverables

You receive synchronized video, depth, proprioception, and control logs, calibration files, episode metadata and scene catalogs, and optional labels, in the formats your pipeline expects, with documentation and provenance.

Where teleoperation fits

Teleoperation programs power humanoid robotics and warehouse automation capture alike. For practical guidance on avoiding expensive pilot mistakes, see teleoperation best practices.