What Is Data Factory One?

Josh Gruenstein built a 100 robot fleet called Data Factory One in Boston. To his knowledge, Data Factory One is the largest sort of semi-humanoid data collection farm in the United States. The research program is set up to get the most out of robot experience in the real world.

In language models, many different sources of data matter, but the top of the data is real world reinforcement learning traces of doing the thing a system should be able to do. Data Factory One is the research testbed for real world reinforcement learning at scale with robots.

Reinforcement learning is a technique family that does not really work at small batch sizes. A very large fleet out in the real world is what lets the team start to play with methods that, he thinks, people have not been able to play with in academia or industry.