Indian Workers Film Their Own Movements to Train Humanoid Robots

In Tamil Nadu and Bengaluru, thousands of manual laborers are strapping on head-mounted cameras and smartphones that record their every move. They cut mangoes, tie shoelaces, brew coffee, and the footage ends up in American robotics labs, where it trains machines that may one day take over their jobs.

The process is called egocentric data collection. A camera mounted on a worker's head captures the scene exactly as the person doing the task sees it, including hand movement, how an object is gripped, and the sequence of steps. The material goes to engineering teams that break it into frames, tag every gesture, and sell it as a ready-made training data package.

Why India

India has become the center of this practice for two reasons: its huge, cheap workforce in the informal sector, and the near-total absence of regulations protecting workers from commercial use of their image and movement. Companies such as Objectways, with offices in Karur, Tamil Nadu and in the United States, and Humyn Lab are building entire data factories based on footage of ordinary household and warehouse tasks.

The recordings cover not just simple kitchen gestures but also more complex industrial tasks, such as the wrist rotation used to grip an object or sorting goods in a warehouse. This data feeds so-called large behavior models, the physical equivalent of large language models, which teach machines to map human movement onto robot control instructions.

Who's Behind It

The data's recipients are robotics teams tied to the biggest US tech players, including companies developing foundation models for robots. The entire ecosystem is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital betting that humanoid robots will enter warehouses, factories and homes on a mass scale within the next decade.

Among those being recorded are people like a 25-year-old homemaker in Chennai and a 55-year-old worker in Bengaluru who weaves flower garlands. Both earn extra money this way, recording tasks they have performed for years, not always realizing that their movements could be used to replace similar work elsewhere.

Worker Concerns

Digital labor experts warn of what they call a double blow: workers' skills being used while their daily activities are subjected to extreme surveillance at the same time. Labor rights organizations are demanding limits on how long footage can be stored, clear commercial licensing rules, and payouts if the material is used to build profitable products.

Feeding first-person footage into specialised AI models will help robots copy human behaviour - Al Jazeera, on the robot-training process

The lack of regulation in India means workers sign consent forms to be filmed without full knowledge of how long the data will be kept or which commercial products it will end up in. A lawyer specializing in technology law notes that current contracts give those being recorded no control over what happens to their image and movement after the data package is sold.

What Comes Next

The story from India illustrates a mechanism that previously applied mainly to text and image labeling work for large language models, and is now shifting to the body and physical movement. As robotics companies race for the data needed to train machines capable of independently gripping, sorting and moving objects, demand for this kind of footage will keep growing, and with it questions about pay and consent for those whose work is being used to build their potential replacements.

For Polish readers, this is a reminder that the global race for humanoid robots today relies heavily on cheap, loosely regulated human labor in developing countries, not solely on data center computing power. These issues will sooner or later reach European regulators dealing with biometric data protection and platform labor.