One of the biggest challenges in robotics right now isn’t the hardware. It’s data. While many data collection methods are effective, handheld data collection can create a diverse dataset of environments, conditions and strategies for completing manipulation tasks.

Teaching a robot to turn a bolt or pick a single nail from a pile requires thousands of reliable demonstrations. However, if you build a gripper for a robot and then design a separate handheld interface to collect data, it can leave you with demos that don’t transfer well. The proprioceptive feedback the human feels through the interface doesn’t reflect what the robot will actually sense.

The Koala platform: co-designed the handheld grippers and robot grippers around the same linkage mechanism, same degrees of freedom, and same force transmission. The human feels through the linkages what the robot will feel through its actuators.