AirExo-2: Scaling up Generalizable Robotic Imitation Learning with Low-Cost Exoskeletons

Scaling up robotic imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and scalable demonstration collection methods. While teleoperation is effective, it depends on costly and inflexible robot platforms. In-the-wild demonstrations offer a promising alternative, but existing collection devices have key limitations: handheld setups offer limited observational coverage, and whole-body systems often require fine-tuning with robot data due to domain gaps. To address these challenges, we present AirExo-2, a low-cost exoskeleton system for large-scale in-the-wild data collection, along with several adaptors that transform collected data into pseudo-robot demonstrations suitable for policy learning. We further introduce RISE-2, a generalizable imitation learning policy that fuses 3D spatial and 2D semantic perception for robust manipulations. Experiments show that RISE-2 outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on both in-domain and generalization evaluations. Trained solely on adapted in-the-wild data produced by AirExo-2, the RISE-2 policy achieves comparable performance to the policy trained with teleoperated data, highlighting the effectiveness and potential of AirExo-2 for scalable and generalizable imitation learning.

@article{fang2025_2503.03081,
  title={ AirExo-2: Scaling up Generalizable Robotic Imitation Learning with Low-Cost Exoskeletons },
  author={ Hongjie Fang and Chenxi Wang and Yiming Wang and Jingjing Chen and Shangning Xia and Jun Lv and Zihao He and Xiyan Yi and Yunhan Guo and Xinyu Zhan and Lixin Yang and Weiming Wang and Cewu Lu and Hao-Shu Fang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.03081},
  year={ 2025 }
}