Robot training data from automotive suppliers in Sanand and Rajkot
Sanand, just outside Ahmedabad, is home to two large car plants and a cluster of component suppliers, which do a lot of hand assembly. Rajkot adds a long list of auto parts makers. We record kitting, sub-assembly and inspection in both, as egocentric video, multi-view footage and teleoperation data.
The hand work
Kitting is a good place to start. A worker reads a pick list, walks the racks, picks the right parts for one vehicle or one sub-assembly and lays them in a tray or trolley in a set order. It's easy to describe and hard to automate, because the parts vary in shape and size and the racks are crowded.
Sub-assembly is fiddlier: routing wiring harnesses on a board and taping them, pushing clips and grommets into place, fitting seals, mounting brackets and running nuts down with a power tool. Every step has a check: a tug on a connector, a look at a clip, a paint mark once a bolt is torqued. Parts makers in Rajkot add machine tending, assembly and inspection with gauges.
Expect us to record mostly at suppliers rather than on carmakers' own assembly lines, which have their own rules about cameras. Supplier work is often the more manual of the two anyway.
Where we record
- Ahmedabad & Sanand
- Suppliers and sub-assembly units around the car plants. Kitting and sub-assembly.
- Rajkot
- Auto parts makers, foundries and machine shops. Machine tending, assembly and inspection.
Capture setups
- Head or chest camera
- Follows a worker along a whole kitting route, including reading labels and pick lists.
- Wrist cameras
- Shows how fingers find a clip or connector when the part is out of sight.
- Multi-view rig
- Fixed cameras around one assembly station, for repeatable views of the same task across a shift.
- Teleoperation
- If you send a robot arm and its controls, we set it up at a station and experienced workers do the task through it.
- Your own hardware
- Sensor gloves, depth cameras or a rig you've built, set up and run by our crew.
- Labels
- Step boundaries such as pick, route, clip, fasten and check, parts and tools in view, hand keypoints and a short description of each action.
Consent and privacy
Every worker who appears in the data signs an informed consent form, and every site signs an agreement covering what we record and how it can be used.
Suppliers build parts for carmakers who care about confidentiality, so part numbers, drawings, labels and unreleased parts can be kept out of shot or blurred, along with faces, before delivery.
Start with a pilot
Tell us which tasks you need recorded, the camera setup and the labels you want. We'll reply with questions and a plan for a pilot: a few hours of footage first, so you can check the quality before committing to more.