Your first teleoperation session

This is the moment the project becomes fun: you move the small arm, the big arm moves with you, and your brain immediately starts planning what to pick up. One command gets you there.

The command

lerobot-teleoperate \
    --robot.type=so101_follower \
    --robot.port=/dev/tty.usbmodem58760431541 \
    --robot.id=my_follower_arm \
    --teleop.type=so101_leader \
    --teleop.port=/dev/tty.usbmodem58760431551 \
    --teleop.id=my_leader_arm

If you skipped calibration, this command notices and walks you through it first. To see camera views while you drive, add a camera and --display_data=true as shown in the official teleoperation docs.

What should the first hour look like?

Spend it playing. Pick up a cube. Stack two things. Fail at pouring. You are training your own hands before you train the robot's brain, and operator smoothness shows up later in your data quality. Ten relaxed minutes a day beats one cramped hour.

The failures everyone hits

The follower jerks or drifts: recalibrate, and check that each motor got the right ID during setup. A joint moves the wrong way or not at all: on the leader, a motor is probably in the wrong position, because leader joints use different gear ratios. The port disappeared: unplug, replug, run lerobot-find-port again; ports can change names between sessions. Nothing at all: on Linux, permissions (sudo chmod 666 /dev/ttyACM0).

When are you ready to record?

When you can pick up and place one object five times in a row without thinking about your hands. That is the bar. Recording data before that wastes episodes on operator wobble.