Bengaluru, Aug 25: Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL) today introduced Instacore in India, a wearable five-camera hardware system that captures real–world training data for general-purpose robots and physical AI foundation models.
Developed in collaboration with leading robotics partners and Instawork Professionals (Pros), Instacore is purpose-built for commercial environments such as kitchens, warehouses, hotels, and manufacturing facilities.
How Instacore Works
Because data diversity is only possible at scale if workers can actually do their jobs while wearing the system, Instawork Pros tested multiple design iterations of Instacore in real homes and commercial environments to ensure the system can be worn during an entire work shift.
The Instacore system is made up of:
• Five cameras with hardware time synchronization head, chest, and wrists are connected to a power-efficient compute backpack built for a full work shift.
• Stereo head camera provides 3D depth perception at arm’s length.
• Wide-angle chest camera captures the full working environment, giving models the spatial context robots need when operating outside a lab.
• Wrist cameras with tracking markers allow computer vision models to calculate the exact 3D position and angle of each hand, utilizing multiple IMUs for SLAM and pose estimation – translating directly into robot joint angle training data.
• Modular by design: the system can be customized with UMI grippers or alternative camera configurations based on partner requirements, while ensuring usability for real–world operators.
Commenting on how Instacore can accelerate robot training data collection, Mr. Siddharth Srivastava, Head of the Instawork Robotics Lab, APAC, remarked, “Compute isn’t the bottleneck in physical AI anymore. The scale and diversity of real–world skill data is. Instacore is light enough that workers wear it through full shifts, capturing synchronized camera and sensor streams from kitchens, warehouses, and workshops across India, where the task, the tool, and the environment change every fifty kilometers. That variance is what frontier labs are asking for and need.”
New Revenue Opportunities for Workers and Local Businesses
Conceptualised and manufactured by IRL, Instacore connects the robotics industry with Instawork‘s network of 10 million+ skilled professionals, advancing machine learning while opening new income streams for workers and the businesses that host them. Importantly, the system requires no upfront hardware costs and causes no operational disruption, ensuring that businesses are compensated for hours that are already being worked.
Elaborating on Instawork’s India vision, Mr. Vaibhav Pandey, General Manager of Instawork India said, “At Instawork, our overarching mission is to create economic opportunities for local businesses and hourly workers across the globe. With Instacore, we’re giving businesses and their employees a completely new way to participate in India‘s AI economy without disrupting daily operations.”
The Data the Robotics Industry Is Missing
The training data required to teach robots real–world physical dexterity does not yet exist at scale. The industry collected roughly 100,000 hours of robot training data in 2024, growing to approximately one million hours in 2025. Projections reach 20 million hours in 2026, which is still less than 0.04% of what researchers believe is ultimately needed.
Industry Scale
Goldman Sachs forecasts the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2035. Grand View Research projects the global data collection and labeling market at $17 billion by 2030. Deloitte estimates nearly 2 million skilled physical AI jobs will go unfilled by 2030.