🤖 Startup ShiftX has come up with a brilliant data collection scheme for robots.
Everyone says data is the new oil. A bunch of startups are raising huge rounds for collecting and annotating datasets for AI. Especially for robots—teaching a robotic arm to clean an apartment requires thousands of hours of video with real manipulations in real spaces.
The main pain point is monotony. When all the filming is done in one lab, with the same setup, under the same lighting, the model then performs poorly in a real apartment. Different homes, different people, different messes, different lighting are needed.
ShiftX approaches it differently: they come to your home and clean it for free while several cameras record the entire process. The client gets a clean apartment, and the startup gets unique data from real apartments, with different messes and different people.