A 25-year-old woman in Chennai, Nagiridi Sriramyachandra, straps a smartphone to her head every day and films herself peeling mangoes in her kitchen. For an hour of filming she earns about 250 rupees, a little more than $2. The footage is sent to a U.S. data company that uses it to train humanoid robots for household and factory work. She says, “Who else would give you 250 rupees an hour just for housework?” and adds, “Maybe I will get a robot myself in the future.”
Sriramyachandra is not an exception. India has become a major global supplier of training data for robotics, with tens of thousands of workers recording their body movements to teach machines how to act in human environments. Engineers prefer “egocentric” videos, shot from a camera attached to the worker’s head, because they capture depth, hand motion and intention more naturally. That approach helps robots learn household and industrial tasks by watching, rather than by processing millions of lines of code.
In a textile shop in Karur, eight workers were seen wearing head cameras and smart glasses as they documented every movement. The company behind much of this work is Objectways, a data firm with offices in India and the United States that works with Amazon SageMaker and counts Fortune 500 companies among its clients. Its U.S. head of operations, Ravi Shankar, said client requests include “folding clothes, making coffee, cooking a specific dish, making a sandwich.” He added, “Some jobs are meant to be taken, so humans can go and do better things.”
Demand for this kind of data is expected to surge. The humanoid robot market is projected to reach about $38 billion by 2035, and Morgan Stanley has forecast more than 1 billion units in use by 2050 for industrial and commercial purposes. The gap between the worker’s pay, about $2.40 an hour, and the eventual value of the product is stark. The first-person filming also raises privacy concerns, since it can record homes, kitchens and sometimes other private spaces. Some workers refuse to film bedrooms, and labor activists are asking whether people whose movements are turned into commercial data should receive ongoing compensation or royalties. Participation is usually project-based and voluntary, but economic pressure in the regions supplying the data can blur the line between choice and necessity.
