Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday unveiled the company’s Tesla Bot, a robot code-named Optimus that shuffles, waves, and pumps its arms in a low-speed dance move in a scene. He said the robot could cost $20,000 in three to five years.
“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as soon as possible,” Musk said. Said. It may eventually “help millions”, but the first uses will be in Tesla’s auto factories, he said.
The robot was not as flashy as the others, Boston Dynamics’ parkour-enabled Atlas, but that’s what Tesla has put together in less than eight months. “The robot can do a lot more than we showed you. We just didn’t want it to fall on his face,” Musk said. Tesla Artificial Intelligence Day 2022an event designed to showcase the robot and the company’s autonomous vehicle technology, Full Self-Driving or FSD.
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As a result, Musk wants to build millions of Tesla Bots, taking advantage of the hardware, software, manufacturing and supply chain developed for the auto business. Take the company’s estimates with a grain of salt, though. Tesla has been successful as an automaker and has guided the rest of the industry towards an electric vehicle future, but missed many deadlines along the way.
The Optimus effort, though still early on, is among the most ambitious in the robotics world, given how widespread and capable Tesla hopes robots will be. But progress is difficult. competitors like Boston Dynamics They’ve worked on humanoid robots for years but have only produced prototypes so far. More common are robots with more limited abilities, for example wheeled delivery boats horse Amazon’s Astroa wheeled, camera, household tablet.
AI technology works best in narrow jobs, but Tesla’s car pilot technology and robots must account for the enormous real-world diversity. Optimus will likely lead a sheltered life to begin with. The company plans to use it first. Tesla’s own factories.
Musk said jobs could involve moving parts to traditional robots on the production line.
“The number of situations where Optimus is useful will grow exponentially,” Musk said. Said. “Really, really fast.”
The first prototype of Optimus, codenamed Tesla Bot, is waving an arm at the Tesla AI Day 2022 event.
Screenshot of Claire Reilly/CNET
Two Tesla Bots on stage
Musk showed two robots. The first walking model was built with off-the-shelf mechanical actuators, cylindrical devices combining a motor with gearing and sensors. The latter, whose legs and fingers were controlled by Tesla’s own actuators, could not walk and was put on stage. But his actuators allow him to put his leg to the side and grasp it with his hands. In one video, the boots could do more, including picking up boxes, holding a watering can for plants, and turning from the waistband.
“It wasn’t quite ready to walk, but I think it will walk in a few weeks,” Musk said of the second Optimus robot.
Tesla already had actuator engineers on staff for its vehicles. The strongest actuator, a linear model used on the Optimus leg, can lift 1,000 pounds.
The second Optimus prototype weighs 161 pounds (73 kg). It uses a variation of the same computing hardware that powers Tesla’s FSD autonomous vehicle technology. One engineer said the battery pack has a capacity of 2.3 kilowatt-hours and is “perfect for a full day’s work.” It consumes about 100 watts while sitting and 500 watts when walking fast. It’s kind of like a high-end gaming PC.
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The first robot walked at a slow, mixed pace, placing one foot just in front of the other. His bent knees gave him a somewhat sharp gait, but this stance is common for robots as the straight leg stance requires much more precise balancing abilities. The robot waist could rotate and flex. Its body was adorned mostly with green LEDs, and on its chest was a large computer with dual spinning fans to cool the processors.
Tesla engineers emphasized the degrees of freedom in the Optimus robots—basically the different ways it can be bent or twisted at different joints. Tesla said the full robot body has more than 28 degrees of freedom, with each hand having 11.
Musk said that for security reasons, robots will include an external mechanism for humans to stop them, and this override mechanism will not be updated over the internet. In the long run, for safety reasons, robots will likely be “ruled by some laws of robotics that you can’t get past, such as not harming others,” Musk said. The three laws of robotics from science fiction author Isaac Asimov.
Tesla uses the same AI software to control the Tesla Bot as it uses its cars. Some of the same technology applies, such as measuring the “occupancy” of nearby areas. Tesla said it only trained with real-world environments rather than driving video.
Musk didn’t hold back on Tesla’s sci-fi promises for robots. With robots at work, Musk said the economy has entered a new era, “a future of abundance, a future free of poverty, a future where you can have anything you want in terms of products and services.” “It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.”
