ModPack: An Extensible Teleoperation Interface for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

2026-07-21

AI Summary

Existing teleoperation systems are often tailored to specific hardware and tasks, lacking generality and scalability. This work proposes ModPack—a modular and extensible teleoperation framework that leverages a wearable backpack platform integrating computation, power, communication, and storage functionalities, coupled with a unified wearable interface architecture. This design enables plug-and-play integration of capability modules such as joint-level teleoperation, mobile manipulation, and active perception. The system’s efficacy in real-world mobile manipulation tasks is validated across two heterogeneous robotic platforms, demonstrating significantly enhanced reusability and adaptability. To foster community advancement, the authors open-source all hardware and software designs.

Abstract

Existing teleoperation systems are often tailored to specific robot hardware and task domains, limiting their scalability and adaptability. We present ModPack, a modular and extensible teleoperation system designed to support diverse robot embodiments and task requirements within a unified framework. At the core of ModPack is a self-contained wearable "backpack" that integrates onboard computation, power, communication, and data storage. Built on top of this shared interface, the system supports plug-and-play capability modules including joint-level teleoperation with haptic feedback, mobile manipulation, and active perception. Experiments across two distinct robot platforms and real-world mobile manipulation tasks demonstrate that ModPack provides a flexible and reusable framework for data collection and policy learning. To support future research, we open-source the complete hardware design and software stack. Project website: https://modpack-robotics.github.io/

Problem

• teleoperation
• modularity
• scalability
• adaptability
• mobile manipulation

Innovation

• modular teleoperation
• bimanual mobile manipulation
• wearable backpack interface
• plug-and-play modules
• extensible robotics framework