# In Beijing, an employee places a foam sandwich on a plate more than 700 times to train robots

> 36Kr Japan describes the daily work of China's "data collectors", employees who record their movements so that robots can learn to handle objects.

Published on 2026-10-16

In an office in Wudaokou, the Beijing district where technology companies cluster, an employee the outlet calls Z puts badminton shuttlecocks into a box, one by one.

He wears a black headset fitted with 2 cameras, small cameras on his wrists and gloves with sensors. The system records everything he sees and the path of each of his fingers. The data is then sold to robot makers.

According to 36Kr Japan, the basic pay is 200 yuan a day. Two hours of overtime bring in another 80 yuan.

Another collector, M, holds a controller in each hand to pick up a foam sandwich and place it on a plate. Each attempt takes 2 to 3 minutes, and he repeats it more than 700 times.

Yao Maoqing runs Maniformer, an Agibot subsidiary that specialises in this kind of data. According to him, it would take around one hundred million hours of recordings to give robots general capabilities comparable to those of GPT-3.5. The world currently has only a few hundred thousand.

## Sources

- [36Kr Japan](https://36kr.jp/502855/)

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