New tool gives anyone the ability to train a robot. Really!

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From the abstract:

"Previous methods for Learning from Demonstration leverage several approaches for a human to teach motions to a robot, including teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and natural demonstrations. However, little previous work has explored more general interfaces that allow for multiple demonstration types. Given the varied preferences of human demonstrators and task characteristics, a flexible tool that enables multiple demonstration types could be crucial for broader robot skill training.

In this work, we propose Versatile Demonstration Interface (VDI), an attachment for collaborative robots that simplifies the collection of three common types of demonstrations. Designed for flexible deployment in industrial settings, our tool requires no additional instrumentation of the environment.

Our prototype interface captures human demonstrations through a combination of vision, force sensing, and state tracking (e.g., through the robot proprioception or AprilTag tracking).

Through a user study where we deployed our prototype VDI at a local manufacturing innovation center with manufacturing experts, we demonstrated VDI in representative industrial tasks. Interactions from our study highlight the practical value of VDI's varied demonstration types, expose a range of industrial use cases for VDI, and provide insights for future tool design."

New tool gives anyone the ability to train a robot | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "MIT engineers designed a versatile interface that allows users to teach robots new skills in intuitive ways."

Versatile Demonstration Interface: Toward More Flexible Robot Demonstration Collection (preprint, open access, but it is an old paper first published in October 2024, IROS 2025). According to Google Scholar it has only a citation count of 5, which is low for a 7 months old paper.