Sharpa Robotics Deploys VLA And Tactile Experts To Ease High-DoF Teleoperation
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First time seeing the Sharpa teleop exoskeleton. Very neat
Sharpa Robotics @SharpaRobotics observed that teleoperating a dual hand robot offering a combined 63 DoF is a nightmare, even for an experienced operator. They offer a two fold solution: - a VLA that handles "in hand rotation" (like the apple in video below), that the operator can trigger using a foot pedal. - a Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts that fuses tactile sensing data. Interestingly enough, the first model handles the apple peeling end-to-end, tactile data does not help here. However, it greatly enhances the insertion and grasping of the apple. This research makes use of the SharpaWave 22-DoF dexterous hand, with force and tactile feedback on all ten fingertips. I find it interesting that is now possible to delegate complex low-level finger coordination tasks to RL-trained atomic skills. Optimizing such steps that are difficult to reproduce in teleoperation significantly helps overcoming the data acquisition bottleneck.