Teleoperation

Teleoperation is full remote control of a robot by a human operator, typically with low-latency video feedback and continuous joystick or motion-capture input. Distinct from [remote assistance](/glossary/remote-assistance) (high-level decision-making layered over autonomous behavior) and from autonomous control (no human in the loop).

The distinction matters because teleoperation is the standard data-collection method for [imitation-learning](/glossary/imitation-learning) datasets in humanoid manipulation. Figure's Helix training corpus, Physical Intelligence's π series, and Apptronik's Apollo training all rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations. Every hour of teleoperation is direct human labor; if the resulting policy generalizes poorly, the cost per task may not improve over the labor it replaces. The strongest justification for [VLA models](/glossary/vision-language-action-model) is that they amortize teleoperation cost across many downstream tasks.