About this guide
A buyer's guide for robotics teams choosing the controllers their operators will use, and deciding who those operators will be.
Information about teleoperation hardware is scattered across research project pages, GitHub repositories and product pages that often show no price. A team trying to compare a printed leader arm with a headset and a glove has to assemble the comparison itself. This guide does that work once, in one place, with the sources shown.
Who it is for
Founders, robotics engineers and machine-learning leads at companies building robots, who have decided to collect demonstrations or supervise robots by teleoperation and are choosing the equipment. We assume you know your robot better than any vendor does and that you want prices, degrees of freedom and data formats, not adjectives.
What it covers
Leader arms and kits, VR and mixed-reality headsets, gloves, exoskeletons and handheld capture devices, compared on six published criteria. The second half of the main guide covers the cost that hardware comparisons usually omit: the people who operate the rig, what they are paid, how long they take to train and the option of contracting trained pilots.
How it is made
Every fact comes from a maker's page, an authors' paper or project page, or dated press coverage, and carries a numbered source with the date we opened it. Figures that makers and authors report about their own work are labeled as theirs. Where we calculate something, such as the operator hours that equal a rig's price, we say that the arithmetic is ours and show the inputs. The criteria are on the methodology page.
We re-check prices and product status at least once a quarter. Every page shows when it was last updated and keeps a log of changes.
Corrections
If a price has changed, a product has been discontinued or a fact is wrong, tell us. We correct verified errors quickly and note the change on the page.