Kinesthetic Teaching

A human physically pushes a robot arm through a motion by hand, and the robot records it as a demonstration.

Kinesthetic teaching is the most direct form of demonstration: the arm is switched into gravity-compensation or zero-force (free-drive) mode, in which the motors only cancel out the arm's own weight, so a person can move it around easily, then an operator guides the arm by hand through the whole task while its joint encoders record the entire trajectory. Early industrial robots' “teach and playback” programming worked this way — remembering a sequence of positions and replaying them; in robot learning, it supplies demonstrations for imitation learning. The benefit is that the motion happens directly on the robot's own joints, so there's no need to map a human's action onto the robot, and no extra teleoperation hardware is required. The drawbacks are that the arm has to support being pushed by hand, the human's body enters the camera view and interferes with vision-based policies, it's hard to guide two arms or a multi-fingered hand at once, and it is more physically tiring than teleoperation.

ExamplePut an arm with joint-torque sensors into hand-guiding mode, grab the end effector, guide the gripper to a cup's handle, close the gripper, and lift — the recorded sequence of joint angles is one demonstration.

Also called

KT, Hand Guiding, Direct Teaching

Related

Zero-Force Drag · Gravity Compensation · Teach-and-Playback Programming · Teleoperation · Demonstration Data · Impedance Control

Sources

Wikipedia: Programming by demonstration
Kinesthetic Teaching in Robotics: a Mixed Reality Approach (arXiv 2409.02305)
DexDirect: Direct Kinesthetic Arm Guidance for Efficient Dexterous Demonstration Collection (arXiv 2607.27784)