Egocentric data collection in Kolkata
Kitchens, workshops, garages, logistics hubs and leather and garment clusters across Kolkata, recorded first-person, to your protocol, with consent.
Kolkata is eastern India's largest city, and the work done in it is enormously varied: small kitchens and food stalls, repair workshops and garages, warehouses on the city's edge, and some of the region's best-known leather and garment clusters. For Physical AI teams that need variety, few places offer as many different skilled tasks within reach of one base.
Site types
- Kitchens, workshops, garages. Everyday skilled work in small, varied spaces across the city.
- Logistics hubs. Warehouses with picking, packing, sorting and dispatch in Rajarhat and Dankuni.
- Leather and garment clusters. Cutting, stitching and finishing done by skilled hands in Bantala and Metiabruz.
Task examples
Task categories are always chosen by you. Examples of what can be captured in and around Kolkata:
- Food preparation: washing, chopping, cooking and plating.
- Repair work in workshops and garages.
- Picking, packing, wrapping and sealing orders for dispatch, as in our sample clips.
- Cutting, stitching and finishing leather and fabric.
- Sorting and handling mixed items.
This kind of footage is used as VLA training data, imitation learning data and humanoid robot data.
Access and logistics
- Site access. We find suitable sites, agree access with owners and managers, and sign a written site agreement before recording.
- Operators. We recruit, brief, schedule and supervise the operators, briefing them in Bengali, Hindi or English.
- Getting there. Kolkata is served by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport and by Howrah and Sealdah rail stations.
- Our base. Our office is in Singur, Hooghly district, in the Kolkata region.
- Equipment. You send your cameras or sensors and capture protocol; we set them up and support them on site.
Consent and compliance
Every participant gives written informed consent before recording, and every clip carries operator ID, site, task and consent reference. See DPDP Act AI training data compliance.
Why Kolkata for Physical AI data
Variety is what most real-world datasets lack. In Kolkata a single project can cover cooking in a small kitchen, repair in a roadside garage, order packing in a warehouse and stitching in a garment unit, each with its own tools, objects, surfaces and lighting. For VLA, imitation learning and humanoid teams, that spread of everyday skilled work is hard to find in one place.
Field operations here also cost less to run than in Delhi NCR or Bengaluru, and no major data collector works in the region yet, so sites and operators are not already committed to someone else.
How a Kolkata capture runs
- You share your task categories, capture protocol and equipment.
- We match the tasks to kitchens, workshops, logistics hubs or garment clusters and sign site agreements.
- We recruit and brief operators, and collect written informed consent.
- Operators record under supervision; every clip gets frame checks and metadata.
- Approved clips are delivered by secure upload with an audit trail.
Who Kolkata suits
Kolkata is a good fit for teams that need breadth: household and kitchen tasks, repair, logistics, and work with soft and deformable materials like leather and fabric. If your model has to cope with many kinds of objects and spaces, a Kolkata capture gives you that range within a single project, often within a short drive of each other.
It also pairs well with Howrah, just across the river, when a project needs industrial tasks alongside everyday ones.
Start in Kolkata
The 50–100 hour pilot runs in Kolkata and Howrah and delivers within 2 weeks. See also Howrah and our Physical AI data collection overview.