A desk with a laptop and a stack of books. A shirt waiting to be folded. A kitchen counter, a milk-tea stand and pile of building blocks – all in a single room. Robots of different shapes face their tasks with focus, controlled by a human operator. Pick up. Place. Fold. Repeat. This is not a film set, it is a data collection factory for embodied intelligence – a de facto “data foundry”. The facility, in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, is run by Agibot, a fast-rising robotics company. The data, which is scarce and a key bottleneck, is not only used to train the firm’s in-house models but is also for sale, at prices that can reach several hundred yuan per hour.

Full opinion : Capital floods into China’s robotic sector but profitability remains elusive as challenges emerge with the industry’s business model.