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2 million hours of real-person video feed robots; Midcentury raises $15 million
Dongcha Beating AI Flash: robotics data company Midcentury announced that it has emerged from stealth and completed a $15 million seed round. Rather than building robots themselves, it primarily sells the data and simulation tools needed to train robots.
Midcentury says it has collected more than 2 million hours of first-person real-person video, spanning more than 50 environments and more than 20,000 tasks. In 90% of the footage, a person's hands are visible, and the data is annotated with information including 3D hand and body poses and depth.
Put simply, robots first watch how people pick up objects, open doors, and organize items, then learn to do the same. Large models can crawl the internet to learn text directly, but robots lack a ready-made "internet of actions"; Midcentury aims to fill this data gap.
It has also developed a simulation platform called Matrix. Robots can first run thousands of tests and training sessions in a virtual environment before being deployed on real hardware, reducing the cost of repeated trial and error in real-world environments.
Original link https://m.theblockbeats.info/flash/368632