MiFeng pays people to record chores for robot training
Its Mifengpai app is a Chinese counterpart to Figure's Index, but sells the data to other robot makers instead of training its own.
Robot-data company MiFeng Technology launched Mifengpai on Sept. 23, an app through which ordinary people borrow a head-mounted camera or a tactile gripper, record their daily work and are paid for usable footage.
Why it matters
Training data gathered by teleoperating real robots is limited by how many robots and operators there are. Paying people to film their own work removes that limit, and tests whether unscripted human footage can stand in for teleoperation at scale.
The details
- MiFeng says it has put 20,000 recording kits into homes, shops and workplaces, can build tens of thousands a month, and has logged about 1 million hours of usable data.
- Its buyers include Tencent's Robotics X lab and Ant Group's Lingbo, the company says.
- Footage is graded S, A, B or C rather than discarded, across 22 categories of scenes.
- One report puts participants' earnings at 3,000 yuan or more a month. In a one-month trial, 20,000 users registered and submitted 13,000 tasks.
The catch
Every volume figure is MiFeng's own, including its description of the app as the first platform of its kind.