What the data shows

1
Collecting robot training data tops the task list, named in 60.6% of the 1,150 roles read, ahead of logging issues and writing reports (37.1%).
Figure 1
2
66.0% of roles read mention teleoperating a robot, demonstrating tasks or collecting robot data, and 49.8% driving, flying, monitoring or taking over from autonomous vehicles and drones; 35.0% mention both.
Figure 1
3
At the median, a role read names 3 distinct tasks; 71.7% name three or more, while 2.3% match none.
Figure 5
4
The single strongest concentration is recording video of one's own tasks in Egocentric & Wearable Capture, mentioned by 99.3% of that kind's roles read compared with 15.7% across all roles read.
Figure 2
5
Counting only tasks that have 3 or more priced roles spread across at least 3 employers, the top median goes to roles that mention evaluating or scoring a robot's performance and flying drones or aircraft ($38/hr) and the bottom one to roles that mention recording video of one's own tasks ($21/hr); the median for all roles read is $27/hr.
Figure 3
6
The widest gap between employers is on working with riders, customers or the public, which appears in 100.0% of Amazon Prime Air's roles read but only 0.0% at Claru.
Figure 4
7
Beyond operating, 23.6% of roles read mention recording video of one's own tasks or household chores, 12.8% annotating or reviewing data, and 24.8% resetting, maintaining, inspecting or setting up robots and equipment.
Figure 1

Figure 1

Tasks robot training roles describe

What are people hired into robot training roles actually asked to do?

Task	Roles mentioning it	Share of roles read	Most often in	Employers
Collect robot training data	697	60.6%	AV & Drone	52
Log issues and write reports	427	37.1%	AV & Drone	41
Work with riders, customers or the public	422	36.7%	AV & Drone	61
Monitor robots or autonomous vehicles	335	29.1%	AV & Drone	29
Drive test routes	304	26.4%	AV & Drone	19
Do household or everyday physical tasks	257	22.3%	Egocentric Capture	27
Reset, charge or maintain robots	196	17.0%	AV & Drone	37
Intervene or take over control	187	16.3%	AV & Drone	21
Record video of your own tasks	180	15.7%	Egocentric Capture	15
Test autonomy software and features	174	15.1%	AV & Drone	34
Inspect vehicles or equipment	158	13.7%	AV & Drone	24
Teleoperate or remotely pilot a robot	127	11.0%	Teleoperation	33
Demonstrate tasks for a robot to learn	101	8.8%	Demonstration Collection	26
Review data quality	95	8.3%	Teleoperation	35
Annotate or label data	92	8.0%	Teleoperation	29
Train or coach other operators	55	4.8%	AV & Drone	12
Fly drones or aircraft	48	4.2%	AV & Drone	19
Evaluate or score robot performance	33	2.9%	AV & Drone	11
Set up scenes, sensors or equipment	24	2.1%	AV & Drone	12

Base: 1,150 roles live on 31 Oct 2026 with a full description on their job board (100 employers and programs), or 100.0% of all 1,150 open roles.

A task counts as mentioned when any of its documented patterns turns up somewhere in the description. Being mentioned does not make it the role's main job, and it is common for a role to mention several tasks.

A requirement counts like a duty ('experience with VR teleoperation' mentions teleoperating): the figure counts what the descriptions talk about.

Credit: RobotTraining.jobs Research, The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition.

Figure 2

Tasks by kind of work

How does the task mix change from one kind of robot training work to another?

Task	AV & Drone (544)	Fleet Operations (237)	Egocentric Capture (134)	Demonstration Collection (127)	Teleoperation (82)	Data Annotation (17)	Evaluation & QA (9)
Collect robot training data	72%	15%	82%	87%	56%	12%	11%
Log issues and write reports	57%	16%	2%	17%	62%	18%	0%
Work with riders, customers or the public	52%	44%	2%	7%	22%	18%	44%
Monitor robots or autonomous vehicles	42%	25%	0%	0%	56%	6%	11%
Drive test routes	51%	8%	0%	2%	1%	6%	67%
Do household or everyday physical tasks	5%	24%	96%	28%	9%	12%	11%
Reset, charge or maintain robots	23%	16%	2%	14%	12%	0%	33%
Intervene or take over control	28%	13%	0%	1%	5%	0%	11%
Record video of your own tasks	0%	0%	99%	30%	4%	24%	0%
Test autonomy software and features	29%	4%	0%	2%	0%	18%	33%
Inspect vehicles or equipment	16%	29%	0%	2%	0%	0%	0%
Teleoperate or remotely pilot a robot	1%	2%	0%	35%	87%	0%	11%
Demonstrate tasks for a robot to learn	5%	2%	2%	44%	15%	6%	0%
Review data quality	4%	3%	2%	20%	32%	59%	56%
Annotate or label data	3%	1%	0%	19%	37%	94%	22%
Train or coach other operators	7%	3%	0%	2%	2%	6%	22%
Fly drones or aircraft	8%	1%	0%	0%	0%	0%	11%
Evaluate or score robot performance	5%	0%	0%	0%	6%	6%	22%
Set up scenes, sensors or equipment	3%	1%	1%	2%	2%	0%	11%

Base: 1,150 roles live on 31 Oct 2026 with a full description on their job board (100 employers and programs), or 100.0% of all 1,150 open roles. Only kinds of work with enough roles read to stand on their own appear (2.5 or more roles read, a weight fitted on this table's own counts). A cell gives the percentage of that kind's roles read that mention the task; the column header shows how many roles were read.

All kinds of work with at least one role read appear here.

Credit: RobotTraining.jobs Research, The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition.

Figure 3

Posted pay for roles that mention each task

Which tasks go with the best posted rates?

Task	Median per hour	Middle half	Against all roles read	Roles stating pay	Employers stating pay
Evaluate or score robot performance	$38	$32 to $49	1.41x	8	5
Fly drones or aircraft	$38	$34 to $44	1.41x	15	7
Annotate or label data	$31	$25 to $33	1.15x	19	14
Demonstrate tasks for a robot to learn	$30	$28 to $39	1.11x	25	12
Teleoperate or remotely pilot a robot	$30	$25 to $32	1.11x	26	17
Test autonomy software and features	$29	$25 to $34	1.07x	42	17
Log issues and write reports	$28	$25 to $34	1.04x	120	24
Work with riders, customers or the public	$27	$25 to $32	1.00x	194	30
Inspect vehicles or equipment	$27	$25 to $29	1.00x	32	12
Set up scenes, sensors or equipment	$27	$25 to $30	1.00x	15	3
Collect robot training data	$26	$21 to $30	0.96x	113	27
Monitor robots or autonomous vehicles	$26	$25 to $32	0.96x	70	17
Reset, charge or maintain robots	$26	$24 to $30	0.96x	82	19
Drive test routes	$25	$23 to $29	0.93x	73	13
Intervene or take over control	$25	$23 to $27	0.93x	56	11
Review data quality	$25	$20 to $28	0.93x	15	12
Do household or everyday physical tasks	$22	$21 to $30	0.81x	95	18
Record video of your own tasks	$21	$15 to $80	0.78x	63	8
Train or coach other operatorsSmall sample	$22	$22 to $33	0.81x	11	2

Base: 1,150 roles live on 31 Oct 2026 with a full description on their job board (100 employers and programs), or 100.0% of all 1,150 open roles. An hourly rate appears on 349 of the 1,150 roles read (median $27/hr).

Pay is the hourly number in the posting, using the midpoint of any range. A task gets a median once 3 priced roles from 3 or more employers mention it; tasks short of that are flagged and placed below the ranked ones. 'Middle half' spans the 25th to the 75th percentile, and 1.00x equals the median across all roles read.

A role that mentions several tasks is counted under each of them. Tasks also cluster by kind of work and seniority, so a gap in pay shows the two go together, not what the task itself is worth.

Credit: RobotTraining.jobs Research, The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition.

Figure 4

Tasks by employer

How do the largest employers differ in the work they describe?

Task	TSMG (503)	Tesla (170)	Amazon Prime Air (59)	Alignerr (41)	HireArt (25)	Transdev (25)	Claru (16)	Serve Robotics (16)
Collect robot training data	93%	62%	0%	63%	48%	44%	0%	6%
Log issues and write reports	49%	32%	29%	0%	36%	40%	0%	81%
Work with riders, customers or the public	27%	8%	100%	0%	32%	96%	0%	100%
Monitor robots or autonomous vehicles	47%	6%	29%	0%	16%	52%	0%	0%
Drive test routes	36%	22%	0%	0%	24%	96%	0%	75%
Do household or everyday physical tasks	26%	6%	0%	98%	12%	0%	75%	81%
Reset, charge or maintain robots	13%	8%	0%	0%	44%	100%	0%	13%
Intervene or take over control	22%	0%	0%	0%	4%	88%	0%	13%
Record video of your own tasks	20%	0%	0%	100%	0%	0%	100%	0%
Test autonomy software and features	19%	2%	0%	0%	20%	44%	0%	6%
Inspect vehicles or equipment	15%	24%	0%	0%	8%	0%	0%	0%
Teleoperate or remotely pilot a robot	15%	0%	0%	0%	16%	0%	0%	0%
Demonstrate tasks for a robot to learn	7%	9%	0%	0%	24%	0%	0%	6%
Review data quality	8%	3%	0%	0%	4%	4%	0%	19%
Annotate or label data	9%	0%	0%	2%	8%	0%	0%	0%
Train or coach other operators	0%	19%	0%	0%	16%	0%	0%	0%
Fly drones or aircraft	1%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%
Evaluate or score robot performance	3%	0%	0%	0%	12%	0%	0%	0%
Set up scenes, sensors or equipment	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	48%	0%	0%

Base: 1,150 roles live on 31 Oct 2026 with a full description on their job board (100 employers and programs), or 100.0% of all 1,150 open roles. Shown: the 8 employers with the most roles read. A cell gives the percentage of that employer's open roles read that mention the task, with the number read in the column header.

Based on postings alone: the shares are of an employer's open roles, not its hires or projects. Each employer writes from its own template, so a task built into that template shows up in every one of its roles.

Employers are set against each other on a task only when each has enough roles read to stand on its own for that task's share, judged by a weight fitted on every employer's own counts of the task.

Credit: RobotTraining.jobs Research, The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition.

Figure 5

Number of distinct tasks per role

Is a robot training posting usually about one task, or several?

Distinct tasks mentioned	Roles	Share of roles read
No task named	27	2.3%
1 task	143	12.4%
2 tasks	155	13.5%
3 tasks	311	27.0%
4 tasks	294	25.6%
5 tasks	109	9.5%
6 or more tasks	111	9.7%

Base: 1,150 roles live on 31 Oct 2026 with a full description on their job board (100 employers and programs), or 100.0% of all 1,150 open roles.

The taxonomy has 19 tasks. Roles with none matched describe the work in wording that no pattern picks up, such as a bare project overview or a list of requirements.

Credit: RobotTraining.jobs Research, The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition.

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This report sums up records we gather ourselves, day after day:

1,432 robot training roles followed, history included
Every role on 100 employer job boards, read each day since 12 Sep 2026: its pay, its place, and the first and last day it was up.
536 apply clicks over 28 days
Which robot training roles people really apply to, by kind of work, pay and place. The clicks happen here, so no one else can count them.
25 sourced industry datasets
Funding, revenue, deals, fleets, deployments and prices across the robot training industry, each record linked to the publication it comes from.

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The raw records
Every robot training role we track: title, employer, place, kind of work, pay as stated, and the days it was first and last open.
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New and closed roles every week or month, as file drops or through the data endpoints.
A custom cut
Any figure here by country, city, kind of work, vehicle, employer or date, or your own hiring benchmarked against the market.

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Investing in robotics, AV or robot-data companies? The Robot hiring radar is these records role by role, every day, as files.

Robot hiring brief: free, once a month

The robot-training job market in figures, on the first weekday of each month: open roles, what opened and closed, who added and who cut, and posted pay by kind of work. To your work email.

How it was measured

Every day this site reads the public job boards of the robot training employers and programs it follows. Where a feed includes the full description, that text is read too. A single database query produces each figure for the window shown, and the live page and every monthly edition run that identical query. The note under each figure gives its base.

Mention: A task is mentioned when any of its documented patterns turns up in the description (whole words, any case, never spanning two lines), whether in the duties, the requirements or a project note. A mention need not be the core task, and roles often mention more than one.
Task: One of 19 activities a description can name, from teleoperating, demonstrating and collecting robot data, through recording first-person video, household tasks, annotating and reviewing data and evaluating robots, to testing autonomy software, monitoring, intervening, driving test routes, flying drones, inspecting, resetting and maintaining robots, setting up scenes, logging issues, training other operators and working with riders and customers. Each has a published pattern.
Pay by task: The median hourly rate among roles that mention a task. It needs 3 roles with a stated rate, and it enters the ranking only if they span 3 or more employers; a median that rests on fewer employers is displayed with a mark but left unranked.
Coverage: Only roles with a full description on their job board are included, and each figure gives that count.
Open role: On a given day, a role that has been posted and still shows in the employer's feed.
Kind of work: A role's title and description place it in one of the seven kinds of robot training work this site follows, ranging from robot teleoperation and demonstration collection through egocentric capture, embodied-AI annotation, robot evaluation and fleet operations to AV and drone operation. Each kind has a page of its own.
Window: Live page: the 28 most recent full days (UTC). Edition: a single calendar month (UTC).

Limits of this data

Hiring that happens off public job boards is invisible here, and some data-collection programs sign people up inside an app instead of posting a job.
A posting does not equal a hire. Certain employers leave evergreen roles up for months, and others post the same role once per city or country.
Large employers often reuse one description per city, so their template carries extra weight in any share drawn from descriptions.
A mention may not be the main job, and requirements count the same as duties ('experience with VR teleoperation' counts as mentioning teleoperating).
Unusually phrased tasks can slip past the patterns, and nothing is read in beyond the text. Pay gaps between tasks are associations, since tasks go hand in hand with kinds of work and seniority.

Collection and classification of listings are explained on the methodology page. Freshness, completeness and consistency are tested daily in the data quality report.

Monthly editions

The live page spans the 28 most recent full days and updates daily. Every finished month also gets its own edition, locked two days after month end, so a number quoted from it stays fixed.

Live page28 most recent full days, rebuilt daily
October 2026 edition (you are here)Will lock when the next daily refresh runs

Quoting this report

You may quote, chart or republish these figures under CC BY 4.0, provided you link back to this page. This edition is locked: its numbers will not change.

Citation

RobotTraining.jobs (2026). The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition. https://robottraining.jobs/research/what-robot-trainers-do/2026-10

BibTeX

@misc{robottrainingjobs_what_robot_trainers_do_2026_10,
  author = {{RobotTraining.jobs}},
  title = {The Tasks Behind Robot Training Jobs, October 2026 edition},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://robottraining.jobs/research/what-robot-trainers-do/2026-10}},
}

Files: every figure in one CSV (a row per value) or as JSON, emailed to your work address.Other open data: datasets and API

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