Teleoperation

A human controlling a robot remotely in real time, often by having it mirror the motion of their own hands.

• The operator wears a VR headset or moves a matching 'leader' arm; the robot copies the motion while its cameras stream back what it sees.
• Each session records paired images and motions, today's main source of robot training data, at a cost of roughly one person-hour per robot-hour.
• Companies also use it as a fallback when autonomy fails, so a smooth demo may be partly human-driven unless that is disclosed.
• Over long distances, network delays of 100 milliseconds or more make delicate contact work hard, because the operator is reacting to the past.