SEED-UMI: Sharing the Exoskeleton between human and robot for onE-to-one Dexterous demonstration

SEED-UMI: Sharing the Exoskeleton between human and robot for onE-to-one Dexterous demonstration

|Authors: Tengbo Yu, Jiahao Wu, Daohan Li, Bingxu Chen, Hao Liu, Xiaojian Ma, Hangxin Liu

|Venue: arXiv preprint | Year: 2026

|arXiv: 2609.11753v1

Abstract

Imitation learning for dexterous hands is bottlenecked by the difficulty of collecting contact-rich demonstrations that transfer faithfully to the robot. Prior wearable-exoskeleton systems record only on the human side and retarget via open-loop mappings calibrated in free space, which degrade under contact. We present SEED-UMI, a framework in which both the human and the robot wear the same exoskeleton: joint encoders become a physically shared measurement, and wrist cameras mounted to the exoskeleton observe the same outer mechanism during both human data collection and robot policy rollouts. This turns retargeting into paired cross-embodiment supervision and lets policies train directly on raw exoskeleton-centric wrist images, without segmentation or inpainting. On five contact-rich tasks, SEED-UMI achieves 3.0x greater data collection efficiency than exoskeleton-based teleoperation and a 70.0% average rollout success rate.

Key Contributions

• Imitation learning for dexterous hands is bottlenecked by the difficulty of collecting contact-ri…
• Prior wearable-exoskeleton systems record only on the human side and retarget via open-loop mappi…
• We present SEED-UMI, a framework in which both the human and the robot wear the same exoskeleton:…
• This turns retargeting into paired cross-embodiment supervision and lets policies train directly …
• On five contact-rich tasks, SEED-UMI achieves 3.0x greater data collection efficiency than exoske…

Topics

• manipulation
• vision
• reinforcement-learning
• learning-from-demonstration

Code & Data

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/Tengbo-Yu/SEED-UMI

BibTeX

@article{Yu2026_260911753v1,
  title     = {SEED-UMI: Sharing the Exoskeleton between human and robot for onE-to-one Dexterous demonstration},
  author    = {Tengbo Yu and Jiahao Wu and Daohan Li and Bingxu Chen and Hao Liu and Xiaojian Ma and Hangxin Liu},
  year      = {2026},
  eprint    = {2609.11753v1},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.RO},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11753v1}
}