What is Humanoid Robot Data?

A humanoid is a whole-body system. The commercial platforms from Unitree, Agility, Figure and others carry anywhere from the mid-teens to more than 40 actuated joints, and every action has to keep the robot upright, so the data includes base pose, foot contact and center-of-mass state alongside arm and hand motion — streams a fixed-base arm never produces.

Locomotion is usually learned in simulation, where a fall costs nothing and thousands of parallel environments run on one GPU. Manipulation is where real data is needed, and it is collected by teleoperation — VR controllers, or a motion-capture rig that maps the operator's arms and hands onto the robot.

Human motion is a source in its own right: AMASS aggregates over 40 hours of optical capture from more than 300 subjects into one skeleton format, and humanoid projects have learned skills by retargeting that motion onto their platforms. Two things make this category hard — falls are destructive, so collection is slow and careful, and the robots are scarce, so a commissioned project almost always runs through a partner lab, with the platform named first in the brief.