Diligently gathered human demonstrations serve as the unsung heroes empowering the progression of robot learning. Today, demonstrations are collected by training people to use specialized controllers, which (tele-)operate robots to manipulate a small number of objects. By contrast, we introduce AR2-D2: a system for collecting demonstrations which (1) does not require people with specialized training, (2) does not require any real robots during data collection, and therefore, (3) enables manipulation of diverse objects with a real robot. AR2-D2 is a framework in the form of an iOS app that people can use to record a video of themselves manipulating any object while simultaneously capturing essential data modalities for training a real robot. We show that data collected via our system enables the training of behavior cloning agents in manipulating real objects. Our experiments further show that training with our AR data is as effective as training with real-world robot demonstrations. Moreover, our user study indicates that users find AR2-D2 intuitive to use and require no training in contrast to four other frequently employed methods for collecting robot demonstrations.

翻译：精心收集的人类演示数据作为驱动机器人学习发展的无名英雄默默贡献力量。目前，演示数据是通过培训人员使用专用控制器来收集的，这些控制器通过远程操作机器人操作少量物体。相比之下，我们提出了AR2-D2：一种收集演示数据的系统，其特点为（1）无需受过专门培训的人员，（2）数据收集过程中无需任何真实机器人，因此（3）能够使用真实机器人操作多种物体。AR2-D2是一个以iOS应用程序形式存在的框架，用户可通过它录制自己操作任意物体的视频，同时捕获训练真实机器人所需的关键数据模态。实验表明，通过我们的系统收集的数据能够训练行为克隆智能体操作真实物体。进一步实验证明，使用我们的增强现实数据训练效果与使用真实机器人演示数据训练效果相当。此外，我们的用户研究表明，与其他四种常用机器人演示数据收集方法相比，用户认为AR2-D2直观易用且无需培训。