MR. ROBOT and TROOPERS just signed an MoU to explore something genuinely practical for humanoid robotics: using real footage of actual frontline workers to help train robots doing everyday commercial tasks. The idea is to combine TROOPERS’ massive workforce network with MR. ROBOT’s robotics and AI training expertise, creating a pipeline of real-world data that robots can actually learn from.
TROOPERS offers access to more than 500,000 registered workers, over 270,000 hours of frontline work logged monthly, and connections to more than 1,000 enterprise clients spanning retail, warehousing, food and beverage, and events. That gives the collaboration a genuinely wide range of real tasks to draw from, everything from stocking shelves and picking and packing products to preparing food and drinks.
To start, TROOPERS will coordinate with participating workplaces to handle permissions and worker consent, then capture first-person recordings from the workers’ actual point of view, showing exactly how they move and complete tasks. That human-generated data then gets paired with data coming out of MR. ROBOT’s Data Collection Centre in Malaysia, which currently runs 20 AgiBot G2 humanoid robots operating around the clock. Through its Data-as-a-Service offering, MR. ROBOT will handle the collection, annotation, quality review, and dataset preparation, essentially blending egocentric human footage with robot-generated movement data into training sets that can actually improve how humanoid robots operate in commercial settings.
Edwin Yap, Founder and CEO of MR. ROBOT, said real-world task data gives insight into how work actually gets done outside a controlled robotics lab, and combining that with robot-generated data opens up new ways to build AI models that help humanoid robots function more effectively in real commercial environments. Meanwhile, Joshua Tan, CEO and Co-Founder of TROOPERS, framed it as an opportunity for frontline workers to have a genuine hand in shaping how automation develops in the region, while making sure things like workplace access, worker participation, and data governance are all handled responsibly throughout the process.
