[Reiwa]

Well butter my butt and call me a butler

How filming your chores could train the android butlers of the future

“Manufacturing, factory warehouses, retail, nursing homes, hospitals – you’re going to need this type of data in basically every single environment, and that’s because the movements are all different,” said Arian Sadeghi, vice president of robotics data at Micro1, which began recruiting its own army of remote videographers last year.

“The thing we tell them is, ‘If you think you want a robot to do this for you, go ahead and record it,’” Sadeghi said.

Though Micro1 is based in Palo Alto, California, it has about 4,000 “robotics generalists” in different households across 71 countries, who send the company more than 160,000 hours of video each month. Sadeghi said that’s nowhere near enough.

“You need probably billions of hours,” he said. “We haven’t even gotten to human interactions. This is just simple household chores.”