React / docs /recording.md
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Lead with robot-arm-free / human-hand collection — README hero + 'What's different' section, tasks.json gets operator/embodiment fields, recording.md explains setup, F7 adds Operator column
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Recording setup

This document describes the hardware and sensor configuration used to record the React dataset. Schema for the resulting .pt files is in schema.md.

Collection method — robot-arm-free, human-hand operated

React is recorded without any robot arm. A human operator holds one GelSight Mini sensor in each hand and performs the task directly. Compared to robot-collected manipulation data this means:

  • No robot kinematic constraints, no robot occluding the scene, no robot-specific visual features.
  • The tactile sensors move with natural human-hand dynamics — varied trajectories, jerks, regrasps, etc.
  • Cross-embodiment by design: any downstream policy / dynamics model trained on this data does not bake in a particular robot morphology.

The trade-off: there are no robot joint angles or commanded actions in the data. Sensor 6-DoF pose comes from a motion-capture system (OptiTrack VRPN) tracking rigid-body markers rigidly attached to the back of each GelSight Mini, and a separate rigid body tracks the manipulated object (e.g. the motherboard). The dataset therefore does not include action labels and is not an imitation-learning / behavioral-cloning corpus.

Sensors

Stream Hardware Native shape Rate
3 × RealSense color Intel D415 (serials 143322063538, 104122062574, 217222066989) 480×640×3 uint8 (BGR) 30 FPS
3 × RealSense depth same 480×640 uint16 (mm) 30 FPS
2 × GelSight tactile GelSight Mini (left / right, handheld) 480×640×3 uint8 ~25 FPS, resampled to camera ticks
3 × OptiTrack rigid bodies motherboard, sensor_left, sensor_right 7-vector (x, y, z, qx, qy, qz, qw) ~120 Hz

Each RealSense camera's calibration is stored in the source repo under twm/calibration/result/T_mocap_to_cam_{middle,left,right}.json. The serial→position mapping:

Camera Serial Calibration file Role
cam0 143322063538 T_mocap_to_cam_right.json right-side view
cam1 104122062574 T_mocap_to_cam_left.json left-side view
cam2 217222066989 T_mocap_to_cam_middle.json overhead / center view

The OptiTrack-to-GelSight rigid transforms are stored alongside in T_gel_to_rigid_{left,right}.json. These let you project the GelSight contact center into any of the three camera views; see the per-recording GIFs under figures/episode_previews/ for examples.

Timing

All streams share a common monotonic timestamp axis, recorded in the timestamps dataset (camera tick rate, 30 Hz). Per-tracker OptiTrack streams keep their own higher-rate timestamps under optitrack/<body>/timestamps in the raw HDF5 (not preserved in the processed .pt slice).

The processed dataset (processed/mode1_v1/...) nearest-neighbor-aligns the OptiTrack pose stream to camera ticks. The full ~120 Hz pose track is only in the raw HDF5 mirror.

Coordinate frames

  • OptiTrack reports positions in meters relative to the mocap room origin.
  • Quaternions follow (qx, qy, qz, qw) ordering (scalar last).
  • The T_mocap_to_cam_* extrinsics map mocap-frame coordinates into camera-frame coordinates (right-handed, +Z forward).

Tasks recorded

Task Description
motherboard Bimanual manipulation of components on a computer motherboard (CPU placement, lever seat, screw tightening).

More tasks will be added as collection continues; see ../tasks.json for the machine-readable registry.