During Tesla’s annual AI Day 2022 event in Palo Alto, California, the company’s CEO Elon Musk showed off a prototype of the Optimus humanoid robot. He walked around the stage, waved his “hand” to the audience in the hall and even tried to demonstrate something similar to a dance.
Last year, Elon Musk announced the development of a humanoid robot from Tesla, showing on stage a concept that turned out to be a person dressed in a robot suit. This time, at the presentation of Tesla 2022 AI Day, Musk himself admitted it, joking about the “guy in a suit”, but still showed a working prototype of the humanoid robot Optimus.
The robot does not look like last year’s demonstration yet. In fact, Tesla showed two prototypes at once, the first was developed back in February of this year, without skin and final design. The development team said that the presentation is the first time it is used without additional support and moves on its own. The second Optimus prototype Musk called “very close to production.” On the contrary, it has an almost complete body, but it cannot yet move independently. During the presentation, the robot stood on a stand and waved to the audience.
Tesla Bot coming out and dancing 🤣 @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/TKT1lSGyqa
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 1, 2022
A video of Optimus carrying boxes, watering flowers, and moving some metal gizmos at the Tesla factory was also shown.
Regarding the technical characteristics of the Tesla Optimus robot, according to company representatives, it will receive a battery with a capacity of 2.3 kWh, which should allegedly be enough for a full day of operation of the robot. The battery is located in the rib cage of the robot and its feature is the integration of the battery and all the electronics required for its operation into one unit. So in theory, although it wasn’t mentioned during the presentation, there is a possibility that the batteries of the Optimus robots could be quickly changed.
According to Elon Musk, their goal is to create a useful humanoid robot as soon as possible. The problem with such modern robots, in his opinion, is that they “don’t have a brain”: they don’t have enough intelligence to navigate the world on their own, they are also very expensive and are produced in limited editions.
Optimus, on the contrary, will become an “extremely capable robot”, will be produced in very large quantities (almost millions of pieces), while the expected cost will be even lower than that of a car – up to $20,000.
One Tesla SoC is used for the “brain” of the robot, in addition, wireless Wi-Fi and LTE communication are supported. The developers also used 28 structural actuators to enable the robot to move and support a weight of up to 500 kg.
Each robot arm has 6 actuators, 11 degrees of freedom of movement and can manipulate tools, small parts and carry packages weighing 9 kg.
For training, the Tesla robot used software from its autopilot cars, so it also sees and studies the world around it with the help of sensors and cameras.
Elon Musk seems to have big plans for the Tesla robot, including using it to make manufacturing cheaper.
“It’ll be a fundamental transformation for civilization as we know it,” Musk said at the presentation. He goes on to say that Optimus has the potential to improve manufacturing economics by “two orders of magnitude”.
You can watch the Tesla AI Day 2022 presentation in full in this video:
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