Towards crowdsourcing spatial manufacturing tasks from rural India

Many tasks involving production software that involve spatial reasoning can only produce "good" rather than optimum solutions. It is frequently possible for humans to improve on algorithmically generated solutions computed by CAD/CAM software. The thesis motivating this research is that large numbers of industrial optimisation tasks involving spatial reasoning (such as 2D part nesting) can be outsourced as human intelligence tasks to rural workers to provide a sustainable source of skilled employment. We hypothesis that 3D spatial reasoning ability is essential to solve spatial optimization tasks. In this paper we reported the 3D spatial manipulation ability of eighty rural workers in four rural business process outsourcing (BPO) centres in India. The assessments reveal that although the average spatial manipulation ability is less than the literature reported benchmark, there are talented workers identified in all the four rural centres, and the results identify priority activities required to enable the proposed approach.