Manufacturing & workshop
Requirements
Driver and bit selection, clamp-and-align, press-fit, and wire strip-crimp-terminate all live in finger-level detail that RGB video alone cannot resolve. Each needs 3D hand pose tracked through reach, grasp, and place.
Fastening, measuring and marking to tolerance, press-fit and interference assembly, and tool hand-off between hands each need their own coverage, not one generic "assembly" label.
Small fasteners can fall below a depth sensor’s reliable floor. Hand pose stays valid at that range, but metric depth on sub-centimetre parts is flagged rather than interpolated, so you know exactly where the depth stream stops being trustworthy.
A perpetual, buyer-owned commercial license backed by a documented consent chain, so a policy trained on the data can go into a product.
Why it matters
Public benchmark datasets for bimanual precision, such as EgoDex, have genuinely strong hand pose, but their licenses forbid commercial training use and forbid derivatives — so they cannot legally reach production weights.
Bench assembly is also the cleanest environment to run this kind of capture in, because the operator controls the whole scene: lighting, clutter, and tool layout can be varied deliberately rather than relying on incidental footage that was never captured against a named skill list.
Capture setup
A head-mounted camera keeps the fastening, measuring, and fitting motion in frame from the viewpoint a manufacturing policy will actually see from, across home workshop, maker bench, and small production cell environments.
Depth, 3D hand pose, contact events, and action segments are aligned to video on one hardware clock. Small fasteners below the depth sensor floor are flagged rather than interpolated, while hand pose remains valid at that range.
The spec
You describe the assembly tasks your policy needs. We turn it into a written spec covering tasks, environments, capture tier, annotation depth, and accept criteria, then quote reach, timeline, and price against that document before any capture begins.
The collection runs through the same seven-stage end-to-end custom collection pipeline as every Firsthand program: contributor recruiting, capture, per-batch QA, anonymization, and licensed delivery. Rejected items are recaptured at our cost.
Fast · on demand
Where coverage is already deep, the first validated batch lands in a median of 48 hours from signed spec. Thin environments typically take three to four weeks, because vetting operators there is the bottleneck, and we quote that timeline up front.
On-demand top-ups run against the same spec and accept criteria after each training run, so new assembly data stays consistent with what you already hold.
Rights
Every custom collection ships under a perpetual, buyer-owned commercial license, and exclusivity is available so the data is never resold. Each episode links to a signed contributor release through a documented consent chain.
Faces, plates, and screens are detected and irreversibly blurred at ingest, and a reviewer confirms the result before anything ships. The anonymization record is delivered with the data.
Assembly task vs delivery
| Assembly need | What Firsthand captures |
|---|---|
| Bench work in frame | Head-mounted camera keeping fastening, measuring, and fitting motion visible through the task cycle |
| Named skill coverage | Driver and bit selection, clamp-and-align, measure and mark to tolerance, press-fit, wire strip-crimp-terminate, tool hand-off |
| Hand-level detail | 3D hand pose tracked through reach, grasp, and place |
| Contact detail | Contact and grasp events at the point of fastening or fitting |
| Depth on small parts | Synchronized depth stream, with metric depth on sub-centimetre parts flagged rather than interpolated |
| Action structure | Instance segmentation, action segments, and frame-accurate task boundaries |
| Quality | Measured against signed accept criteria; billed per validated hour; reject log with every batch |
| Formats | RLDS, LeRobot, WebDataset, plus HDF5, zarr, and Rerun .rrd |
Every collection runs through the same seven-stage end-to-end custom collection pipeline.
FAQ
Sources
Tell us the assembly tasks your policy needs to perform. We will quote reach, timeline, and price against a written spec, with a first validated batch in a median of 48 hours where coverage is deep.