Collecting Data

Capture rich multimodal data for all your downstream tasks

Open up the Anvil Web App

The Anvil Web App is the hub for managing data collection. Data is collected in Episodes, which are grouped into Sessions.

Open it up, either by clicking the Desktop shortcut or navigating yourself to localhost:3000 in the browser, and click New Session to create a session:

Create an episode and start recording

Name your session and click Create Session:

Click New Episode, scroll down past the topics list and click Start Recording:

You're now actively recording. You can use this page to monitor your data and system health which recording is happening, and click Stop Recording when you're done with this Episode.

Creating episodes with the Quest controllers

If you're recording data by yourself, it can be hard to control the robot and manage the Web App. To make this setup easier, you can use the A/B buttons on the Quest controller to start/stop episodes. Just pin the session you want new episodes to be created in:

and now the A button will start recording a new episode in this session. Press the B button to stop recording of that episode.

Get your data

When you're done, you can download your data from the browser, either by episode or by session. Alternatively, you can find all the data at ~/anvil-loader/data/recordings on your Anvil Devbox:

anvil@anvil-workcell:~/anvil-loader/data/recordings$ tree
.
├── tshirt-folding
│   └── 0001
│       ├── 0001_0.mcap
│       └── metadata.yaml
├── build-legos
│   └── 0001
│       ├── 0001_0.mcap
│       └── metadata.yaml
└── take-apart-legos
    ├── 0001
    │   ├── 0001_0.mcap
    │   └── metadata.yaml
    └── 0002
        ├── 0002_0.mcap
        └── metadata.yaml

Anvil data is recorded in the standard MCAP format which means that you can view, inspect, and manipulate it using many popular existing tools, like Foxglove and Rerun.

You can get more info on the Web App itself here:

Anvil Web App