Two spacetimes, one data value chain >India: Workers’ headcams... record garment sewing egocentric data flows to AI/robotics companies. >China: Operators teleoperate humanoid robots in warehouses, sorting packages …validating the system ,collecting real-world training data.show more

I am posting after a Long Time on Twitter,... but its to announce a big change. I have started and we are Collecting Egocentric Data at Scale from India, Covering 300 + Commercial Locations 1500 + Households This is the network and base we have built in just past 2 months, as the Robotics companies, VLMs and World Models increase their requirements on Real World Data collection, Human Loops will be keep scaling out capacity. We are on track to collect 1M Hours of Egocentric in the coming 6 months for our clients exclusively. We are maintaining 95% Quality standards across industrial data and running a End - End Operational Management complying all Indian Laws and compensating our partners/operators. (From Environment sourcing, to hardware, Legal contracts, deployment, training, collection, processing) Check our Samples: - Commercial Videos -- Household Videos --- Multimodel ---- Egocentric + Live Audio Narration Links : On the Journey to become #1 India Physical AI Data Partner. We are also building our capacity as annotation and labelling partner for data companies to become end-end partner for companies. A big change from the world of crypto and web3 but physical AI and data space is where i want to build my next venture #Egocentric #EgocentricIndia #PhysicalAI #Robotics #India #AIdata #data #Multimodeldata #worldmodels #VLMs #Humanloops #Egocentridata #Multimodeldatashow more

Announcing our commercial partnership with Booster Robotics Booster builds... humanoid robot hardware, OS, and developer tools to make humanoid robots more affordable, reliable, and practical. The partnership centers on using simulation to multiply the value of real-robot data—expanding teleoperation demonstrations into scalable training data across diverse tasks and scenes. This joint effort powers sim-real co-training and foundation-model development, accelerating progress from hardware iteration to deployable robot policies. Together, we're building simulation‑powered data infrastructure for Physical AI — making scalable training data accessible to model developers and the broader robotics ecosystem.show more

Pi Ventures Joins Hack VC To Back AI Robotics... Startup On Base Axis Robotics (Axis Robotics) has raised a $12 million seed round led by Hack VC, with participation from Pi Network (Pi Network) Ventures, Nomad Capital, 10K Ventures, and other angel investors. The company is building a data engine for Physical AI that combines simulation, real world data capture, and human feedback to generate scalable robotics datasets. Axis said the funding will accelerate development of its global human in the loop data engine. Base (Base APAC) congratulated the team, calling Axis one of the leading scalable Physical AI and robotics platforms building on the network.show more

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s... hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.show more

Trained on zero real-world data. Learned to walk, pick... up boxes, and follow multi-step instructions... in the REAL world. ( 📌 Paper below) Researchers from Amazon FAR, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU scanned real rooms with an iPhone, rebuilt them as 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, then generated 48,000 synthetic trajectories of a Unitree G1 walking, grasping, and placing objects inside those virtual replicas. They rendered the robot's first-person camera view from each run and paired it with the matching language instruction and motion data. That's the dataset every humanoid team needs and nobody has: synced egocentric video + language + kinematics, at scale. Instead of collecting it in the real world, they manufactured it. They trained a vision-language-kinematics policy on that synthetic data alone, then deployed it on the physical G1 across five task types: navigation to a named object, lifting boxes of three different sizes with no per-size tuning, chained multi-step tasks, robustness to mid-task layout changes and flickering lights, and multi-minute long-horizon runs. No real-world fine-tuning at any point. Real-world interaction data has been the hard limit on humanoid learning... slow, expensive, and small. If scanning a room once and synthesizing thousands of labeled interactions holds up as a general recipe, that limit moves. Data stops being the bottleneck robotics teams have to solve for. 📌 Paper: Project: ——- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:show more

Figure is aiming to develop the world’s largest and... most diverse real-world humanoid pretraining dataset. For this purpose, they’re partnering with Brookfield, a global asset manager overseeing $1 trillion in assets, including 100,000 residential units, 500M square feet of commercial office space, and 160M square feet of logistics space. The data collected from this collaboration will be used to train Figure’s Helix AI model, enabling humanoids to perform tasks autonomously in real-world environments designed for humans. In addition to data collection, the partnership will explore support for next-generation GPU data centers, real estate for robotic training environments, and commercial use cases across Brookfield’s global footprint.show more

Pretty human-like hand Beijing-based SynapX will unveil its tendon-driven... OctoH-Hand at WRC. Human-scale in size, the hand uses a hybrid architecture combining fully tendon-driven actuation with direct-drive motors in the forearm. It integrates 28 independently controllable actuators and 23 active DoF, along with tactile sensors embedded in the palm. Interestingly…SynapX is building more than just a dexterous hand. It has also developed a World model(SYNWorld), and a data collection system(OctoSense), creating a loop from data collection to world understanding and policy generation, and finally to real-world execution and feedback. Another physical AI bridge for humanoid robots.show more

It's 2030 and you are reviewing humanoid robots. A... Tesla. A Google. An Apple. An OpenAI. A Meta. A Figure. And a bunch of Chinese-made ones. Which one is best, and why? I think the Tesla understands the world much better. Why? There were eight Teslas around me on the freeway today. Start there. No other robot company has that data. But my robot is parked at the local high school twice a day. Its cameras see humans in all of our weirdness. How we move. Where we go. Where we walk. Who we talk with. What you are wearing. Whether your hair was combed this morning. That data will lead to robotics breakthroughs. Apple might keep up with its Vision Pro data, but it is too freaked out by the privacy implications of using said data. (On the front are six cameras and a couple of TOF -- Time Of Flight -- sensors that can see everything in your home in great detail). Google has a lot of data, for sure. All my: 1. Email. 2. Calendars. 3. Photos. 4. TV watching behavior. 5. Contacts. 6. Documents and spreadsheets. 7. Files. 8. Location data. So I expect Google's robot will be attractive to many. But how do you see the others shake out over the next five years? Make some guesses. But remember what an AI pioneer told me years ago about AI: it's all about the data. The Chinese ones have huge advantages: the Chinese have more data on their citizens, and many more citizens to boot AND they can make robots cheaper than we can. But now that you know OpenAI is building its own robot you have caught wind of what I've heard from many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: that humanoid robots are the real prize of AI and will be highly profitable for those that can make them and find customers willing to buy them. Here, too, I learned long ago never to bet against Elon Musk. Will you?show more

The 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games opened today in... Beijing, and a world record has already been set. The Lightning robot, developed by smartphone maker Honor, ran 100 meters in 9.32 seconds, beating Usain Bolt's human record of 9.58 seconds. A total of 2,056 humanoid robots from 666 teams are participating in the games, competing in various real-world tasks and athletic events, such as house cleaning, firefighting, soccer, running, boxing, and more. Comment from me: Artificial intelligence is the foundation of future technological and environmental development. Today, we can see that two global centers have emerged in terms of the number of data centers, AI infrastructure, and the integration of AI into industrial and humanoid robotics: the United States, along with Japan and South Korea, and China. Russia is not an independent center and is lagging far behind the leaders, having squandered all its potential in the war. Europe is currently following the US lead, but it is already developing its own AI structures and semiconductor strategy, changing regulations, and investing hundreds of billions in technological autonomy, and it could become the third global center.show more

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for... Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷show more

For the first time in the history of automation,... the people most likely to be replaced are the ones building their own replacement, frame by frame, for a few dollars an hour. Across India, Nigeria, China, and Argentina, workers are strapping cameras to their heads and recording every fold of laundry, every stitch, every washed dish, and that footage is training the robots designed to do those exact jobs. This is documented, not rumor. No jokes! Garment workers in Tamil Nadu, India have been filmed wearing head-mounted cameras on the factory floor, sending point-of-view footage to data firms whose clients include Fortune 500 companies. One US company alone has hired thousands of workers across more than 50 countries to record themselves cooking, cleaning, and folding clothes. More than 6 billion dollars poured into humanoid robots last year, and the one ingredient every maker is starved for is precisely this: real human hands doing real human work. The endpoint is stated plainly by the buyers. In China, one supplier said his pitch to factories is to let workers wear the cameras now, because trained robots will eventually work there instead. The quiet part is the exchange itself. The worker is paid for the hour and keeps nothing after it. No share, no royalty, no ownership of the movements their own body is teaching the machine. The skill leaves their hands and becomes someone else's product, and almost no one along the chain sees the full shape of the trade, not always the person filming, not the millions who watch the clip and scroll on. One scene holds all of it. A humanoid robot spent an hour folding three shirts while a human housekeeper, hired to guide it, quietly finished the rest of the chores. Every automation before this arrived from the outside. A machine showed up and took the job. This one is being built from the inside, by the workers themselves, handing over the last thing they had left to sell. UBI ? or something totally else should pave the way in the future? Thoughts?show more

I believe solving robotics = 90% engineering + 10%... research vision. Project GR00T is NVIDIA's moonshot initiative to build physical AGI for humanoid robots. The GEAR Lab is assembling a crack team right now. Join us! Openings: - Sr. Research Engineer, Robotics Systems - Sr. RE, Reinforcement Learning - Sr. RE, Foundation Model Training Infrastructure - Sr. RE, Simulation - Sr. RE, ML Data Pipelines - Research Scientist - Research Intern (both part-time and summer full-time in 2025) For the Sr. positions, we strongly prefer candidates with many years of engineering experience at robotics/autonomous driving companies, or MLOps/large-scale AI teams at big techs. For interns, we welcome ace robotics hackers anywhere! Show me your past works. Job links in the thread. Apply today! Your resumes will be my best Christmas gifts:show more

Memo is a robot that uses AI to perform... household tasks effectively. Today Sunday announced its Series B, and we’re proud to be investors. Training robots for the home is hard — the environment is messy, dynamic, and full of edge cases. So Sunday is training robots directly on real households. Founders Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi built a glove-based system that lets hundreds of contributors record everyday tasks in their own homes, creating high-fidelity demonstrations that feed directly into robot learning. Home robotics will be defined by the companies that learn fastest from real homes. Sunday is building that loop. More here: Aaref Hilaly Amanda Huangshow more

🚨 THE BIGGEST BOTTLENECK IN AI ISN'T COMPUTING POWER... ANYMORE IT'S MOVING DATA. Instead of laying new cables, Chinese researchers have upgraded existing fiber infrastructure by doing two things at once: Using three wavelength bands (C + L + S) instead of the usual two. Using four cores inside each fiber instead of one. Each core acts like an independent highway, and each band acts like an extra lane on that highway. Together, they’ve reportedly increased transmission capacity per core by nearly 50% and overall data throughput by up to 5×. This matters enormously for AI. Modern AI clusters move terabits of data per second between thousands of GPUs. The biggest bottleneck is often not the chips themselves, but moving data fast enough between them. If you can push 5× more data through the same physical cables, you can train bigger models faster and reduce network congestion. Why this is significant: • It shows multi-core + extended spectrum technology moving from labs into real-world commercial use • The system has already run over 35 km of existing telecom network • It could be especially useful for submarine cables and large-scale data center interconnects • China is also eyeing it for its “Eastern Data, Western Computing” project The deeper implication: We’re reaching the physical limits of how much data we can push through single-core fibers using traditional methods. By combining spatial multiplexing (multiple cores) with spectral multiplexing (more wavelength bands), engineers are finding new ways to keep scaling bandwidth without having to dig up the planet to lay new cables. This kind of breakthrough is quiet but foundational it’s the kind of infrastructure upgrade that will determine how fast AI and cloud computing can actually grow in the coming years. The future of data movement might not require more cables. It might just require smarter ones. How important do you think multi-core and multi-band fiber will be for keeping up with AI’s exploding data demands? Follow for more frontier networking, photonics, and infrastructure technology.show more

Xiaomi Humanoid Robot New Factory Training Since Q1, Xiaomi’s... humanoid robots have been training on dual-side operations at the self-tapping screw workstation in its auto factory, achieving a 98% success rate. Today, Xiaomi shared that the CyberOne Gen2 autonomously performed two repetitive tasks in the final assembly logistics area: sorting center console side panels and folding material boxes --both reaching 90% success rates. They deployed both bipedal and wheeled models, working together with material transport robots as part of the broader intelligent automation system. I noticed the wheeled CyberOne was clearly more efficient and stable on the panel sorting task. In the first video, you can also see some noticeable jitter when the bipedal robot stops moving (though this should be relatively easy to fix). Xiaomi also candidly pointed out a current limitation in dexterity: when folding the second side of the material box, the robot still needs to adjust its orientation first to face the buckle, whereas skilled workers can pull the ring directly by feel without any micro-adjustments. Real-world scenarios are indeed the best benchmark.show more

I spent a month in Shenzhen visiting factories and... robotics companies, and the contrast with the U.S. was striking. While Figure and Boston Dynamics hide their humanoids behind closed doors, Chinese companies have massive showrooms open to the public. But what really stood out wasn't just the transparency, it was how good they are at selling. Take UBTech: they've already sold 1,200 humanoid units at $200k each to factories. And here's the kicker, these robots aren't even that useful yet. They can only pick up and drop boxes at 1/10th the speed of a human, and factories still need to hire system integrators to train them for specific tasks. My theory is that these factories are terrified of getting left behind in the robotics/AI wave. They're investing in new tech not because it's ready, but because they can't afford to wait. The second surprise was the breadth of their robotics portfolio. These companies aren't just building humanoids, they're deploying service robots everywhere: restaurants, hotels, apartments. Consumer robots are cleaning houses, pools, pet waste, dishes. They're covering the entire spectrum. But the education piece shocked me most. I picked up what I thought was a high school or college robotics textbook, it was for primary school. The government mandated AI and robotics education starting in elementary school. Almost every single school in China now has AI and robotics curriculum, complete with education robots so kids can learn by building. They're creating a generation that grows up fluent in robotics and AI. China owns the supply chain and the hardware stack. But here's what I think people are missing: the race isn't just about who can build robots faster or cheaper. The U.S. advantage has always been in the layer between hardware and human, the interaction design, the software intelligence, the intuitive interfaces that make complex technology feel natural. China is building the physical infrastructure, but they're also learning fast. Every deployed service robot, every classroom full of kids building with education kits, every factory running humanoids, that's all data collection at scale. The window for the U.S. to establish its wedge is narrowing. It's not enough to be better at AI or software anymore. We need to be building the integration layer, the intelligence that makes physical AI actually useful, not just impressive in a showroom. Because right now, China isn't just manufacturing robots. They're manufacturing a robotics-native culture, and that might be the most defensible moat of all.show more

This reported breakthrough apparently used a dataset that’s open... for researchers. It’s the work of Eddy Xu, a teenager who was one of the first to get in on the video training data gold rush. He dropped out of Columbia last year to launch Build AI, which has raised around $22 million so far. Build AI’s Egocentric-1M dataset reportedly includes 1 million hours of data recorded using the startup’s self-developed devices across factories in Southeast Asia. A lot of it is from India. Xu has said he’s moved his team to Bengaluru, dedicating $10 million to get data from Indian factories. India has become one of the prime locations for collecting this kind of data. While enrolled at Columbia Engineering, Xu went viral in January 2025 after showing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasseshe modified to cheat at chess. The student, then 17, connected the device’s camera to a chess engine that calculated the best move and relayed it in real-time. The tech reached a wider audience thanks to popular streamer and chess master Alex Botez publicly tested them. Before college, the Long Island-raised Xu won DECA’s global business championship and sold an edtech startup that reached more than 178,000 users in 90 days. He also launched a startup called Omega Robotics in middle school, raising about $120,000 to run an independent, coach-free competitive robotics team out of a basement. Xu and co-founder Jonathan Jia, who serves as CTO, moved to San Francisco to build the first recording devices with a small team. They quickly moved operations to Shenzhen to quickly iterate and scale production. Build previously offered smaller datasets with 10,000 and 100,000 on Hugging Face but the 1M dataset requires emailing Xu directly. I’m sure he’s flooded with requests now.show more

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference... Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more