U-ARM : Ultra low-cost general teleoperation interface for robot manipulation
Yanwen Zou, Zhaoye Zhou, Chenyang Shi, Zewei Ye, Junda Huang, Yan Ding, Bo Zhao
2025-09-08
Summary
This paper introduces U-Arm, a new system for remotely controlling robotic arms. It's designed to be affordable and easily adaptable to work with many different commercially available robot arms.
What's the problem?
Controlling robots remotely, especially with precision, can be expensive and complicated. Existing low-cost options often lack the performance or flexibility needed for many tasks, and dealing with extra movement capabilities (redundant degrees of freedom) in the robot can be difficult for the operator to manage.
What's the solution?
The researchers created U-Arm, which uses 3D-printed parts and carefully selected components to keep the cost down – around $50 to $57 depending on the robot arm it's controlling. They designed three different versions of a 'leader' arm that the operator uses to control the robot, and these versions all work the same way, making them compatible with different robots. They also improved the design and control system to make it easier to handle robots with extra movement options, preventing jerky or inaccurate control.
Why it matters?
U-Arm makes advanced robotic teleoperation more accessible to researchers and hobbyists because it's so affordable. It also performs better than other similar low-cost systems, allowing for faster and more efficient data collection and task completion. By making the designs and data publicly available, the researchers hope to encourage further development and innovation in this field.
Abstract
We propose U-Arm, a low-cost and rapidly adaptable leader-follower teleoperation framework designed to interface with most of commercially available robotic arms. Our system supports teleoperation through three structurally distinct 3D-printed leader arms that share consistent control logic, enabling seamless compatibility with diverse commercial robot configurations. Compared with previous open-source leader-follower interfaces, we further optimized both the mechanical design and servo selection, achieving a bill of materials (BOM) cost of only \50.5 for the 6-DoF leader arm and 56.8 for the 7-DoF version. To enhance usability, we mitigate the common challenge in controlling redundant degrees of freedom by %engineering methods mechanical and control optimizations. Experimental results demonstrate that U-Arm achieves 39\% higher data collection efficiency and comparable task success rates across multiple manipulation scenarios compared with Joycon, another low-cost teleoperation interface. We have open-sourced all CAD models of three configs and also provided simulation support for validating teleoperation workflows. We also open-sourced real-world manipulation data collected with U-Arm. The project website is https://github.com/MINT-SJTU/LeRobot-Anything-U-Arm.