The Tesla Bot, code-named Optimus, was presented by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday. The robot strolled around a stage, waved, and pump its arms in a slow dancing routine. In three to five years, the robot may cost $20,000, according to Musk.
“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible,” Musk said. It could eventually “help millions of people,” but the first uses will be in Tesla’s car factories, he said.
Although the robot wasn’t as impressive as some others, such as Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, which is capable of parkour, it was what Tesla managed to construct in less than eight months.”The robot can do a lot more than what we showed you. We just didn’t want it to fall on its face,” Musk made the joke at Tesla AI Day 2022, an exhibition of the robot and the business’s self-driving car technology, known as Full Self-Driving, or FSD.
In the end, Musk aims to produce millions of Tesla Bots using the manufacturing, supply chain, and manufacturing advantages created for the company’s vehicle business. However, take the company’s estimates with a grain of salt. Although it has led the rest of the industry toward an electric vehicle future, Tesla has been a successful automaker despite having missed numerous deadlines.
Given how common and powerful Tesla thinks the robots may be, the Optimus project is among the most ambitious in the robotics field even though it is still early. But making progress is challenging.
Competitors like Boston Dynamics have been working on humanoid robots for years, but they have only created prototypes so far. Robots with fewer capabilities are more prevalent, such as wheeled delivery robots or Amazon’s Astro, a tablet with a camera for the home.
While Tesla’s car-piloting technology and robots must take into account the enormous variety of the real world, artificial intelligence technology performs best with certain tasks. It’s likely that Optimus will begin his existence in safety. The business intends to utilise it initially in Tesla’s own plants.
According to Musk, jobs might entail delivering parts to conventional robots on the production line. Musk displayed two machines. Mechanical actuators, cylindrical devices that combine a motor with gearing and sensors, were used to construct the first, walking model. The second could not walk and was wheeled out onto the stage. Its limbs and fingers were controlled by Tesla’s own actuators. However, its actuators enable it to elevate one leg to the side and grasp with the other. In a video, the robots demonstrated other abilities like picking up boxes, twisting at the waist, and watering plants while carrying a watering can.
For its vehicles, Tesla already had actuator engineers on staff. The Optimus leg’s linear actuator, which is the strongest actuator, has a 1,000-pound lifting capacity.
At 161 pounds, the second Optimus prototype is heavy (73 kilograms). It makes use of a variant of the computer gear that Tesla employs to power its FSD autonomous driving system. According to one engineer, its battery pack’s 2.3 kilowatt-hour capacity is “perfect for a full day’s work.” It uses approximately 100 watts of power while seated and 500 watts when moving quickly. That resembles a high-end gaming computer.
The first robot shuffled along at a leisurely speed, putting one foot barely in front of the other. Although it had a somewhat mincing gait due to its bent knees, robots frequently have this posture since a straight-leg stance calls for considerably more refined balance skills. The robot had waist flexion and could pivot. The majority of the LEDs on its body were green, and its chest held a sizable computer with two revolving fans to cool the CPUs.
The degrees of freedom of the Optimus robots—basically, the various ways it can bend or twist at different joints—were highlighted by Tesla engineers. According to Tesla, the entire robot body has more than 28 degrees of movement, and each hand has 11.
According to Musk, the robots will have an external override mechanism so that people can stop them for safety reasons; this override mechanism won’t be updated online. Long-term, the robots will probably be “governed by some laws of robotics that you cannot overcome, like not doing harm to others,” Musk added, alluding to science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. This is presumably for safety reasons.
The Tesla Bot is managed by the same AI programme that Tesla uses to drive its vehicles. The same technology is used, such as measuring the “occupancy” of adjacent places. As opposed to driving simulators, real-world surroundings are used for training, according to Tesla.
Musk didn’t hold back while making futuristic claims about Tesla’s robots. Robotic labour ushers in a new era of economics, Elon Musk described as one of “future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty, a future where you can have whatever you want in terms of products and services, It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.”
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