In Indonesia, gig workers film household chores to train robots — ABC News Australia
In Indonesia, 23-year-old Mohamad Dunggio from Gorontalo on Sulawesi has been recording videos of household chores since April as a side income. He is one of thousands of gig workers in various countries who film dishwashing, cleaning, cooking or folding clothes to create training data for robots, ABC News Australia reports.
Dunggio attached a phone to his head and spent four hours recording himself washing dishes. According to him, three companies from Argentina, India and the United States paid him between $3 and $10 per hour for videos of washing dishes, cleaning, cooking, making a bed, ironing, folding clothes and sweeping.
First-person videos
Such data are called egocentric: they are videos or sensor recordings made from the perspective of the person performing a task. A camera is often attached to the head or chest so that the performer’s hands are visible in the frame.
Monash University robotics professor Dana Kulić noted that robots need to learn to observe and respond to their environment, as conditions in homes differ. According to her, data recorded by robots remotely controlled by a person may be more relevant, but human video recordings are cheaper, easier to collect and provide a greater variety of scenarios.
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Those creating such materials include enterprise workers in South Asia, cleaners in the United States and delivery couriers. Kulić also drew attention to questions of participants’ awareness of how the data are used, privacy while filming at home and the possible transfer of recordings to third parties.
Pay and demand for data
Dunggio said that some of his videos were rejected, while some companies charged about $1 in fees to withdraw accumulated earnings of up to $10. He also said that thanks to filming assignments, he began cooking on his own.
Sergio Bruccoleri, vice president of delivery at Australian company Appen, said the company can collect about 60,000 hours of video per month from up to 5,000 participants in different countries. According to him, China is Appen’s largest market for robotics data, with the United States second. The company is increasingly focusing on data from the United States and Canada, where robots are likely to be sold first.
Despite technological progress, Kulić believes that reliable multipurpose humanoid robots for household chores remain a distant prospect. She stressed that there is a significant difference between demonstrating clothes folding and a robot working reliably over a long period, while questions also remain about the cost of production, maintenance and repair.
