U-ARM : Ultra low-cost general teleoperation interface for robot
  manipulation
Authors: name: Yanwen Zou; name: Zhaoye Zhou; name: Chenyang Shi; name: Zewei Ye; name: Junda Huang; name: Yan Ding; name: Bo Zhao
Published: 2025-09-02 15:39:38

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.