Elon Musk Revealed A Humanoid Robot. What Can The New Tesla Optimus Do?

As part of last year's AI Day, E. Musk presented only a mockup of his robot, back then still called the Tesla bot. In fact, it was a person in a costume who performed several dance elements, and despite the fact that such a presentation caused smiles and skepticism, one could assume that the visionary was not bluffing. At the time, he said that the robot should be able to, for example, go to the store to make a purchase instead of its owner.

This year, he demonstrated a functional prototype of the robot named Optimus. This bipedal humanoid can already walk and wave to the audience in a friendly way. According to the manufacturer, it was the first time on the stage in Palo Alto that Optimus walked without any additional support (in the presentation videos it was seen that he is attached to cables and secured against falling).

What should the robot be able to do?

It is interesting that Tesla manufactures the actuators, which are basically artificial muscles for the robot. The same applies to adaptive hands, which were shown at the presentation to be able to manipulate various objects. It seems that in the current state of development, it is no problem for Optimus to pick up a brick and water flowers, or grab a cargo box and carry it somewhere.

The head of the company emphasized that the robot is currently in a relatively advanced stage of development, but even so, he does not see its commercial availability in the near future. The first thousands of units produced should work directly in the Tesla factories and should start free sales within three to five years.

You can find the presentation of the robot from 13:56.

The price should not be higher than the price of the car, and E. Musk estimates that it will be less than 20,000 dollars. He also emphasized that he does not want the robot to be just an ordinary servant. He should also be a "friend" with whom his owner will like to spend his free time.

Further development should gradually expand the robot's possibilities of use, including the catgirl version. With this billionaire, it's hard to tell if he was joking.

Naturally, there will be a catgirl version of our Optimus robot

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2022

Automation of processes in Tesla factories does not necessarily require a bipedal robot, and when we look at the robots in Amazon's warehouses, it is clear that two legs can be rather a disadvantage in terms of stability of movement. However, the company's employees are no longer hiding their enthusiasm that Optimus has a humanoid form. The development team working on it is currently also developing the battery and actuators, the combination of which allows the robot to work all day long on a single charge.

Optimus has the "mind" of a car

The core of the robot is artificial intelligence, which the automaker also uses in its vehicles. It is adapted for use in Optimus, but is also being developed in cars. Part of the presentation was a demo of the new version of the FSD system, which enables the second level of self-driving vehicles. The improvement consists, for example, in the fact that until now training videos for artificial intelligence had to be marked manually. The edges of the road, pedestrians or objects, everything had to be marked manually. This process is now automated and the artificial intelligence in cars can thus learn faster.

AI Day 2022 also included the presentation of Tesla's own chip called Dojo. He plans to use the visionary to build a supercomputer, which he wants to provide as a service for training commercial artificial intelligence.

After all, if there wasn't something funny about the presentation, it wouldn't be Elon Musk. He shared this on his account:

We are a publicly traded company with one class of shares. That means Tesla is run by the public, and I think that's a good thing. So if I go crazy, you can fire me - and that's important. Maybe I'm not crazy.