What is Robot Data Annotation?

Robot annotation is mostly episode-level and temporal rather than spatial. The typical labels are a natural-language instruction for the episode, a success or failure verdict, contact events with timestamps, and sometimes object segmentation masks for key frames. The tooling is general-purpose — CVAT and Label Studio both handle video and time series — so the cost sits in the guideline, not the software.

The success label is where annotators disagree. "Did the grasp succeed?" has an obvious answer only until the object is dropped two seconds after release, or placed slightly off target, or handed over in the wrong orientation. A guideline that defines a hold period and a placement tolerance converts those arguments into a rule; without one, the same episode gets different labels from different annotators.

Pricing follows label depth and is quoted per episode rather than per hour: templated language labels and success verdicts commonly fall in the range of a few cents to a few tens of cents per episode, while per-frame segmentation masks are priced per image at the dollar level. Where success is already implicit in the teleoperation flow, no post-hoc verdict is needed at all. Annotating existing footage is one of the services most often commissioned on its own, and the deliverable that decides quality is the written convention.