Stereo Drain Snaking and Clearing Data

It is first-person video of a person snaking a drain, recorded from the worker’s own point of view with two calibrated cameras, with hand pose and sensor streams alongside. Stereo describes the capture, and MCAP describes the container. They are separate choices.

The site does not state that stereo is already running on these rows. The catalog lists a head-mounted phone or a multiview rig as their capture setup, so a stereo pair is a capture choice agreed in the skill spec and confirmed on a Spec Pilot. The data is human capture by paid, consented contributors, not robot or teleoperation data, so using it for a specific robot still needs your own retargeting step. Firsthand is not affiliated with Foxglove or the MCAP maintainers.

Three, listed in lib/commercial-catalog-data.ts. In the Trade Service Calls (Plumbing / HVAC / Electrical) environment: "Drain Snaking & Clearing", described as "Feed a drain auger into the line, work through the blockage and flush the drain.", and "Snake and clear drain lines using a drain auger and inspection light", described as "Feed the drain auger into the pipe, clear the blockage and check the line with a light." In the Commercial Cleaning & Janitorial environment: "Drain Clearing & Cleanup", described as "Clear blocked drains with a plunger or auger and clean up the surrounding area." All three are rated Medium.

All three are listed as Ready to deploy. The site states no delivered hours and no delivered stereo footage for them, so this page claims none. The Trade Service Calls examples read "Plumber, electrician or HVAC crew on service calls at client sites", and the cleaning environment examples are an office building, shopping mall, airport and industrial facility; these are kinds of site and crew, not named firms, and this page names none. The first table below reproduces the rows as the catalog states them.

This page is the stereo and MCAP treatment of the drain rows. The egocentric drain snaking and clearing page covers the two Trade Service Calls rows without stereo as its subject: it goes deeper on the steps, the ten synchronized streams and the labels. The stereo plumbing and pipe fitting page covers six plumbing and pipe rows and points to the egocentric plumbing page for the task rows, so it does not list a drain row. The stereo restroom cleaning and disinfection page covers four restroom rows, and none is a drain row. The stereo water heater replacement page covers one row in which draining the old heater is a step of the swap, not a drain-clearing task.

No drain type, pipe size or material, auger or light model, blockage type, chemical drain cleaner, code, permit or licensing requirement appears here, because the site states none. The second table below sets the pages side by side, with each row’s status as the site lists it.

The catalog lists "Phone (head-mounted) / multiview rig" for all three rows, and the Trade Service Calls and Commercial Cleaning & Janitorial environment pages list the same capture setup. The site does not state a head-mounted stereo setup for any of them. Stereo applies through the site general stereo offer: a stereo pair is a capture choice agreed in the skill spec and confirmed on a Spec Pilot.

A multiview rig adds synchronized third-person angles, and wrist cameras give a closer view of the hands, when the spec asks for them. Whether a stereo pair is worn, mounted or combined with a multiview rig on these rows is Not stated, and so is where a rig sits relative to the drain.

Snaking a drain is about where a cable enters a line, how the hands hold and feed it and where the tool sits relative to the fixture. A stereo pair recovers depth from the calibrated frame pair rather than from a standalone depth sensor, so the geometry sits in the same capture that shows the hands working it. The site gives no depth accuracy figure for these rows, so what a buyer does with that depth is their pipeline’s question.

A stereo pair adds depth, not a verdict. Most of the job happens inside the pipe, and the site states nothing about how much of the auger or the line the camera sees for this task. The site states 1080p per eye for dataset 06, and whether that resolves the opening at working distance is Not stated, so a spec should check it on a Spec Pilot.

The rows give a natural cut: feed the auger into the line or pipe; work through the blockage (first row) or clear the blockage (second row); flush the drain (first row); check the line with a light (second row). The third row reads "Clear blocked drains with a plunger or auger and clean up the surrounding area", so its stages are clearing with a plunger or an auger, then cleaning up. The stages are the catalog’s own wording.

A spec that says "clear the drain" gives one long action segment. A spec that names the stages gives a sequence you can slice by step, and the site does not set an episode length or say how many attempts make up an episode. Contact events can mark when a hand meets the auger, the light or the plunger, where the spec asks for them.

The first Trade row ends by flushing the drain. The second ends by checking the line with a light, with no flush step, and names an inspection light as a second tool. The third row uses a plunger or an auger and ends with cleaning up the surrounding area. What is used to flush, what the check finds, whether the light is a camera, what counts as clear and how a check is told apart from a failed attempt are Not stated.

A spec that wants a clear or not-clear label has to define it and ask for it at the start. The site lists no such label, no blockage-type label and no pass or fail label for these rows, so none is claimed here.

The site states no under-sink, closet or room dimensions, no clearance, no accuracy figure for depth at close range and no lighting setup for these rows, so this page promises none. Whether the work is at a sink, a floor drain or a cleanout is Not stated.

The site notes that glare-heavy and low-texture scenes make single-frame depth worse, and that depth degrades on wet and reflective surfaces. Raise lighting and space in the spec and check them on a Spec Pilot. An episode is rejected when the manipulated object is out of frame for more than 15 percent of it, and for a drain job the spec decides what that object is: the auger, the light, the plunger or the fitting.

The cable, the drum, the fixture and the pipe can sit between the lens and the fingers. The site states that fingers disappear behind objects, which is why each hand joint carries a visibility flag, and that reach and grasp frames are where blur and occlusion show up. The head camera is global-shutter, which avoids rolling-shutter skew.

The site gives no figure for how often a finger is hidden on this job, so a spec can ask for wrist views or a second angle and check it on a Spec Pilot. The site states no grip-force, torque, cable-length or tool-pose stream, and this page does not claim one.

Protective equipment, gloves, rotating cable hazards and sewage exposure are Not stated, and this page makes no safety or compliance claim. Auger brands, cable lengths, pipe sizes and materials, blockage types or statistics, chemical drain cleaners, camera inspection specs, plumber licensing, job durations and cycle counts are Not stated too.

For every delivered episode the site states that faces, plates and screens are blurred irreversibly, that a reviewer confirms the result before anything ships, and that footage that cannot be de-identified is discarded. The anonymization record ships with the data, an undocumented bystander is a stated reject criterion, and every episode links to a signed contributor release. The site states no separate rule for a household or a commercial building beyond that, so settle it in the spec before capture. This is not legal advice, and the executed agreement controls.

MCAP is an open source container file format for multimodal log data, supporting multiple channels of timestamped pre-serialized data. It is serialization-agnostic, so messages can be Protobuf, DDS (CDR), ROS, JSON and more. Its design is row-oriented and append-only, it stores schemas alongside the data, and it offers an optional index plus optional LZ4 or Zstandard chunk compression.

Reader and writer libraries exist for C++, Go, Python, Rust, Swift and TypeScript, and the mcap CLI can inspect, merge and split files. The foxglove/mcap repository is MIT-licensed; that is the MCAP project licence, not the licence of a Firsthand delivery. The MCAP hub page and the glossary entry cover the format in full.

Firsthand offers MCAP delivery, and dataset 06 is stated as shipping as MCAP. For these rows the site states hand pose, a stereo-derived depth stream with confidence maps, IMU, contact events, action segments, per-frame instance masks and one task instruction per episode elsewhere. What it does not state is which of those are channels in an MCAP file, how they are named, what encoding they use or at what rate.

No topic name, message schema or rate is stated on this page, and none should be assumed. Name the streams that matter in the skill spec and confirm them on a Spec Pilot batch. The fourth table below sets each stream beside what the site states about it.

Hand and tool occlusion is the first risk, under the visibility flag above. Invalid depth on wet or reflective surfaces is the second: an episode is rejected when more than 35 percent of depth pixels in the manipulation region are invalid, and confidence maps ship with depth.

Calibration is measured at the start and end of every session under a 0.28 px RMS gate, and an episode is rejected for a sync breach beyond the ceiling for more than three consecutive frames, for an undocumented bystander or for a mismatch against the named skill spec. A reject log ships with every batch. Whether a line is clear is Not stated. The fifth table below lists the failure modes beside what the site states.

The October 2026 off-the-shelf catalog lists ~324,800 hours across 18 datasets, of which stereo is ~64,800 hours across 9 datasets. The site names no drain, plumbing or trade service dataset among them, so this work is custom collection, not an off-the-shelf purchase.

It is custom collection at scale through a network of thousands of capture providers, for a consistent, recurring data flow to labs. Where coverage is deep, the median time from signed spec to first validated batch is a median of 48 hours; where it is thin, turnaround runs three to four weeks. The site does not say which speed applies to these rows, so the timeline is quoted against your spec. Collections are billed per validated hour, and rejected episodes and recaptures are never billed.

Describe the stages and where each starts and ends: feeding the auger in, working through the blockage, flushing, checking the line with a light, and clearing with a plunger and cleaning up if the cleaning row is wanted. Say whether an episode covers one stage or the whole job, what counts as the object and what counts as a completed step, and name the variation your pipeline is missing. Then name the streams you want in the file, the topic naming and message encoding your reader expects, whether calibration ships inside the file or beside it, and whether MCAP is the only delivery or sits beside RLDS, LeRobot or WebDataset.

Most programs begin with a Spec Pilot, a small first batch that proves the spec and accept criteria on real footage before you scale. The sixth table below shows what each spec element decides.