Tech firms are racing to develop robot assistants that can take over our dreaded household chores. But teaching machines to perform these deceptively simple tasks is tedious. They need to observe the actions thousands, sometimes millions of times. And there's a cottage industry springing up to provide this training.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ayanna Howard, roboticist and dean of Ohio State University’s college of engineering, to learn more.