# From One Hand to Multiple Hands: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Single-Camera Teleoperation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12490/

## Key facts

- Cited by 82 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 33 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2022.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Robot manipulation imitation learning](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/robot-manipulation-imitation-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07113/) (2019)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [Learning Robust Rewards with Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11248/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Deep Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06778/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Demonstrations for Deep Reinforcement Learning on Robotics Problems with Sparse Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08817/) (2017)
- [Deep Imitation Learning for Complex Manipulation Tasks from Virtual Reality Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04615/) (2017)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation from Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06158/) (2018)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [Imitation from Observation: Learning to Imitate Behaviors from Raw Video via Context Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03374/) (2017)
- [MediaPipe Hands: On-device Real-time Hand Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10214/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08606/) (2018)
- [DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03135/) (2019)
- [Visual Imitation Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04899/) (2020)
- [Grasping in the Wild:Learning 6DoF Closed-Loop Grasping from Low-Cost Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04344/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking in Manipulation Research: The YCB Object and Model Set and Benchmarking Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03143/) (2015)
- [Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11592/) (2018)
- [State-Only Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04650/) (2020)
- [Learning by Watching: Physical Imitation of Manipulation Skills from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07241/) (2021)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Videos: Combining Offline Observations with Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06507/) (2020)
- [Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10448/) (2022)
- [Dexterous Imitation Made Easy: A Learning-Based Framework for Efficient Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13251/) (2022)
- [Multiple Interactions Made Easy (MIME): Large Scale Demonstrations Data for Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07121/) (2018)
- [FrankMocap: Fast Monocular 3D Hand and Body Motion Capture by Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08324/) (2020)
- [Graph-Structured Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05518/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07788/) (2024)
- [AnyTeleop: A General Vision-Based Dexterous Robot Arm-Hand Teleoperation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04577/) (2023)
- [Open-TeleVision: Teleoperation with Immersive Active Visual Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01512/) (2024)
- [DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02697/) (2022)
- [Towards Human-Level Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08686/) (2022)
- [VideoDex: Learning Dexterity from Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04498/) (2022)
- [General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09979/) (2023)
- [DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20900/) (2025)
- [TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/) (2024)
- [ExBody2: Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13196/) (2024)
- [DexPoint: Generalizable Point Cloud Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09423/) (2022)
- [Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10880/) (2023)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [LEAP Hand: Low-Cost, Efficient, and Anthropomorphic Hand for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06440/) (2023)
- [Bunny-VisionPro: Real-Time Bimanual Dexterous Teleoperation for Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03162/) (2024)
- [Learning Visuotactile Skills with Two Multifingered Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16823/) (2024)
- [Policy Decorator: Model-Agnostic Online Refinement for Large Policy Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13630/) (2024)
- [DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05706/) (2023)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [Holo-Dex: Teaching Dexterity with Immersive Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06463/) (2022)
- [Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01853/) (2023)
- [Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02338/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19664/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [Hand-Object Interaction Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08273/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Handover: Throw and Catch with Bimanual Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05655/) (2023)
- [Learning Continuous Grasping Function with a Dexterous Hand from Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05053/) (2022)
- [Learning to Imitate Object Interactions from Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13225/) (2022)
- [ACE: A Cross-Platform Visual-Exoskeletons System for Low-Cost Dexterous Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11805/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose to perform imitation learning for dexterous manipulation with multi-finger robot hand from human demonstrations, and transfer the policy to the real robot hand. We introduce a novel single-camera teleoperation system to collect the 3D demonstrations efficiently with only an iPad and a computer. One key contribution of our system is that we construct a customized robot hand for each user in the physical simulator, which is a manipulator resembling the same kinematics structure and shape of the operator's hand. This provides an intuitive interface and avoid unstable human-robot hand retargeting for data collection, leading to large-scale and high quality data. Once the data is collected, the customized robot hand trajectories can be converted to different specified robot hands (models that are manufactured) to generate training demonstrations. With imitation learning using our data, we show large improvement over baselines with multiple complex manipulation tasks. Importantly, we show our learned policy is significantly more robust when transferring to the real robot. More videos can be found in the https://yzqin.github.io/dex-teleop-imitation .
