Teleoperated Demo

A video in which the robot is actually being controlled in real time by a person offstage, not making decisions on its own.

Teleoperation is when a person controls a robot in real time using a VR headset, a leader-follower arm setup, a motion-capture suit, or similar equipment. It's a legitimate technique in its own right, and the main way training data gets collected — the problem is presenting teleoperated footage as a demonstration of autonomous ability without saying so, which the field calls a “puppet-show demo,” borrowing the English phrase Wizard-of-Oz, meaning someone pulling the strings behind the curtain. Teleoperation can prove the hardware is capable, but it doesn't prove the model has learned anything. To spot it, check whether the footage is labeled teleoperated or autonomous, whether the robot's responses look as instant and varied as a human's, and whether the publisher has given a success rate for autonomous operation.

ExampleWhen Stanford's Mobile ALOHA launched in January 2024, its project page split “autonomous skills” and “teleoperated” videos into separate sections; the household-chore videos that went viral afterward were later described by the authors on social media as teleoperated recordings.

Also called

Wizard-of-Oz Demo

Related

Teleoperation · Fully Autonomous · Demo (Demonstration Video) · Remote Teleoperation Takeover · Mobile ALOHA · Pre-Programmed (Choreographed) Motion

Sources

Mobile ALOHA 项目主页（Autonomous Skills / Teleoperation 分栏） (Chinese)
The Decoder: Watch a low-cost, all-purpose robot fry shrimp autonomously（Fu 称居家视频中的机器人「目前」是遥操作） (Chinese)
Teleoperation - Wikipedia