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Sensors, head-mounted cameras
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Daniel Wang came home to his apartment in Beijing and saw a humanoid robot waiting for him. He opened the door, and the robot got to work.
The robot, developed by Shenzhen-based X Square Robot, moved slowly. It spent an hour folding about three pieces of clothing, and another arranging Wang’s shoes. Most of the actual chores were done by a human housekeeper who accompanied it.
But the robot’s main task was to collect training data from a real household. “In terms of privacy, I’m okay with showing these [home] scenes,” Wang told Rest of World. He paid 149 yuan ($22) for the three-hour service. “I feel like I made some contribution to physical AI.”
Robotics development worldwide is constrained by a shortage of training data that combines complex visual and movement information. While the industry initially trained robots through teleoperation – having human workers operate robots repetitively to fold clothes or run microwaves – the approach is costly and time-consuming. It also fails to prepare robots for the variety of real-world environments they’ll encounter.
Chinese tech companies are now devising creative ways to generate training data in realistic settings. Thanks to the country’s relatively low labour costs, government support, and public enthusiasm for robotics development, the industry is mobilising large populations to work in robotics data collection.
Since the beginning of the year, robotics developers globally have ramped up collecting data in actual households, retail shops, and factories, especially through “egocentric” data – first-person videos showing human hands performing various tasks.
While US companies, facing high labour costs, have outsourced this data collection to workers in developing countries, Chinese companies can collect massive data sets locally, which may help them build robots better adapted to domestic environments, according to analysts.
E-commerce giant JD.com, for example, is working with the local government in the city of Suqian, the hometown of founder Richard Liu, to generate 10 million hours of robotics training data over the next two years.
In a dedicated “data collection neighborhood,” residents get paid by filming themselves doing household chores. Workers at a local elderly care center and a kiwifruit farm have also been recruited to wear head-mounted cameras that can record hand movements while working, according to Chinese media reports.
JD.com, which operates an Amazon-style logistics network, said it plans to eventually bring 100,000 employees and 500,000 external workers to join its data collection operations. The company has hailed the program as a way to help local residents earn extra income.
Robotics developers are also working with factories to collect assembly-line work data. Two data vendors in the southern province of Guangdong, a manufacturing hub, told Rest of World they were working with dozens of electronics and packaging factories to have workers wear data-collection devices, including head cameras and wrist sensors that record hand movements.
Some factory owners are reluctant to participate, worried the added operations would slow workers down, Carson Lin, a data supplier in Dongguan, told Rest of World. In addition to paying for the data, Lin has been pitching factories on the long-term benefit: Trained robots will one day work there.
Access to diverse training data will be an advantage for the Chinese robotics industry, Marco Wang, a robotics analyst with Interact Analysis, told Rest of World. The US leads in access to top-tier AI talent and robotics model research, Wang said, but “in terms of hardware and the data ecosystem, China is in the leading position”.
Whether these data collection approaches will lead to a truly intelligent robot is still an open question. Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University, said following the success of large language models – trained on enormous amounts of data – the tech industry is applying the same scaling logic to robotics.
But there’s not yet enough evidence that teleoperation data and egocentric videos could produce robots capable of functioning in arbitrary environments. “It’s not a super-crazy idea,” Fern told Rest of World. “It’s just very unproven.”
Still, the data collection efforts have created new jobs at a time of rising unemployment. Gao Bo, a stay-at-home mom in her 50s, films herself doing chores for six hours a day, at 20 yuan ($3) per hour – a rare type of job that allows her to work while caring for her teenage son.
Her apartment in Shandong province is now spotless from her repeated cleaning every day, Gao told Rest of World. “No one had paid me to cook and do laundry before,” she said
Viola Zhou is a reporter for Rest of World covering China’s tech scene. She is based in New York City.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Source: Scroll
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