VREgo: Consumer VR Headsets for Learning Robot Manipulation from Egocentric Demonstrations

Abstract

VREgo trains manipulation policies from demonstrations recorded on consumer VR headsets; we instantiate it with EgoKit on one such headset, the PICO 4 Ultra. On-device head and hand tracking and stereo object localisation allow the operator to begin a demonstration at the table. We adapt HumanEgo's preprocessing to estimate grasp thresholds per recording, update object positions after release, and propagate segmentation masks between keyframes. We evaluate policies in simulation on two tabletop tasks recorded by one operator. For cube placement, we compare PICO and Project Aria recordings of the same 41 layouts. With 40 training demonstrations, the PICO policies placed the cube on the tray in 67, 74, and 60 of 100 evaluation layouts across three training seeds. The corresponding Aria results were 73, 78, and 0. For a two-stage stacking task recorded with the PICO alone, the baseline placed the block on the tray in 94 of 100 layouts and met the end-of-episode criterion for both placements in two. In one diagnostic episode, repeated replanning deferred release beyond the eight executed steps. Demonstration replays also showed that the open gripper could displace the cube before grasping it. After adapting the training trajectories and adding task-specific execution rules that use simulator object positions, the system met both placement criteria in 93.8% of episodes across four evaluation noise seeds. The same 100 layouts informed rule development and evaluation. VREgo is available at https://vrego.chuange.org/.