mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RoboTurk: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Robotic Skill Learning through Imitation

arXiv 1811.02790 ↗First posted 7 Nov 2018cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 202

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Robot manipulation imitation learning

Abstract (arXiv)

Imitation Learning has empowered recent advances in learning robotic manipulation tasks by addressing shortcomings of Reinforcement Learning such as exploration and reward specification. However, research in this area has been limited to modest-sized datasets due to the difficulty of collecting large quantities of task demonstrations through existing mechanisms. This work introduces RoboTurk to address this challenge. RoboTurk is a crowdsourcing platform for high quality 6-DoF trajectory based teleoperation through the use of widely available mobile devices (e.g. iPhone). We evaluate RoboTurk on three manipulation tasks of varying timescales (15-120s) and observe that our user interface is statistically similar to special purpose hardware such as virtual reality controllers in terms of task completion times. Furthermore, we observe that poor network conditions, such as low bandwidth and high delay links, do not substantially affect the remote users' ability to perform task demonstrations successfully on RoboTurk. Lastly, we demonstrate the efficacy of RoboTurk through the collection of a pilot dataset; using RoboTurk, we collected 137.5 hours of manipulation data from remote workers, amounting to over 2200 successful task demonstrations in 22 hours of total system usage. We show that the data obtained through RoboTurk enables policy learning on multi-step manipulation tasks with sparse rewards and that using larger quantities of demonstrations during policy learning provides benefits in terms of both learning consistency and final performance. For additional results, videos, and to download our pilot dataset, visit hrefhttp://roboturk.stanford.edu/textttroboturk.stanford.edu

Key facts. Cited by 202 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data. First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2019: 2; 2020: 2; 2021: 23; 2022: 21; 2023: 36; 2024: 44; 2025: 46; 2026: 28.

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  1. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  2. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  3. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,427
  4. 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,167
  5. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
  6. 2023BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scalecited by 634
  7. 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 502
  8. 2023Learning Interactive Real-World Simulatorscited by 440
  9. 2025CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 440
  10. 2024RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robotscited by 391
  11. 2025AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systemscited by 390
  12. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 386
38 more
  1. 2022VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Trainingcited by 384
  2. 2024Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 340
  3. 2023MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrationscited by 308
  4. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stonecited by 299
  5. 2024A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AIcited by 274
  6. 2021Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasetscited by 248
  7. 2023Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environmentscited by 239
  8. 2023MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Playcited by 214
  9. 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 199
  10. 2025HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 176
  11. 2023RH20T: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Learning Diverse Skills in One-Shotcited by 173
  12. 2023RoboAgent: Generalization and Efficiency in Robot Manipulation via Semantic Augmentations and Action Chunkingcited by 167
  13. 2024RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulationcited by 166
  14. 2025VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 166
  15. 2024Behavior Generation with Latent Actionscited by 159
  16. 2021Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machinescited by 145
  17. 2024Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulationcited by 144
  18. 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 142
  19. 2023AnyTeleop: A General Vision-Based Dexterous Robot Arm-Hand Teleoperation Systemcited by 136
  20. 2023FurnitureBench: Reproducible Real-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Complex Manipulationcited by 132
  21. 2025RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twinscited by 117
  22. 2021Learning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videoscited by 116
  23. 2024Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 116
  24. 2025EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videoscited by 116
  25. 2024Scaling Cross-Embodied Learning: One Policy for Manipulation, Navigation, Locomotion and Aviationcited by 108
  26. 2025OneTwoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoningcited by 105
  27. 2023HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulationcited by 104
  28. 2024DexMimicGen: Automated Data Generation for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation via Imitation Learningcited by 104
  29. 2020Human-in-the-Loop Imitation Learning using Remote Teleoperationcited by 103
  30. 2021ManipulaTHOR: A Framework for Visual Object Manipulationcited by 101
  31. 2022Robot Learning on the Job: Human-in-the-Loop Autonomy and Learning During Deploymentcited by 101
  32. 2023On Bringing Robots Homecited by 101
  33. 2024Steering Your Generalists: Improving Robotic Foundation Models via Value Guidancecited by 100
  34. 2021Learning by Watching: Physical Imitation of Manipulation Skills from Human Videoscited by 87
  35. 2021S4RL: Surprisingly Simple Self-Supervision for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 85
  36. 2024One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillationcited by 83
  37. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applicationscited by 82
  38. 2023Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulationcited by 78

50 most cited of 202 All 202 (JSON)

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  2. 2025RoboManipBaselines: A Unified Framework for Imitation Learning in Robotic Manipulation across Real and Simulation Environments
  3. 2024RoboCrowd: Scaling Robot Data Collection through Crowdsourcing
  4. 2025Learning a Thousand Tasks in a Day
  5. 2025Robotic Manipulation via Imitation Learning: Taxonomy, Evolution, Benchmark, and Challenges
  6. 2026AXIS: A Growable Community-Driven Data Engine for Scalable Robot Manipulation
  7. 2023GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulators
  8. 2025Bootstrapping Imitation Learning for Long-horizon Manipulation via Hierarchical Data Collection Space