Homes are becoming one of the richest places to collect robot training data, but its not as simple as just recording a video.

Hand force data is becoming one of the most useful signals in robot manipulation.

MaxGlove, from @Maxinsights records touch and force from people’s hands while they work, the layer of a grasp a camera can’t capture.

Pressure decides most of a grasp, whether the glass slides out or cracks. The correction when something starts to slip begins in the fingertips, usually before a camera can pick it up.

A policy trained only on video learns the shape of a grasp and has to infer the force. Glove data supplies the force directly, from people handling the objects robots will be asked to handle.

Maxinsights says it’s aiming for a million hours of force data by 2027, on top of the 2M+ hours of footage captured so far.