Tesla advancing on its goal of creating humanoid robots for production facilities with Optimus.
On September 23, 2023, Tesla shared an update via X to showcase the new capabilities of the Optimus, aka the Tesla Bot. Elon Musk, cofounder and CEO of Tesla, has a goal of using the bipedal humanoid robot to perform dangerous and repetitive tasks currently performed by people in Tesla facilities. Optimus could potentially engage in tasks in factories and on assembly lines, including Tesla gigafactories that make vehicles, solar panels and batteries.
The video shows an Optimus that is more machine than human, with arms and legs that have exposed cables, actuators and joints, but hands and a face that are smooth. The robot uses vision and joint position encoders when enabling itself to learn tasks like sorting blocks by color.
A video states that the neural network for Optimus runs entirely onboard and uses only vision for inputs. In other words, it learns by seeing. The robot is able to handle real-time interaction with human beings. The video shows a person changing the position of several colored blocks on a table. Optimus responds by waiting until the person has taken their hands off the blocks to do its sorting, then moves smoothly and without hesitation to do its tasks.
Optimus is also able to take corrective actions when placing the blocks on a mat, as if reorienting the blocks so they all face the same direction. The video claims that Optimus can be trained to do new tasks, such as unsorting the blocks. In conclusion, we see Optimus engaged in a series of yoga poses. These involve balancing on one leg and extending its arms and legs in the same manner as a person would.
Engineers last got a glimpse of Optimus on March 1, 2023, Tesla Investor Day. At that time, Tesla released a video showing a working model of Optimus assembling another Optimus robot. The last time an audience saw Optimus live was on September 30, 2022, that year’s AI Day. Tesla holds the event annually to recruit AI and robotics engineers.
In 2022, Musk brought an older working model of Optimus onstage that was able to walk and wave by itself. This model weighed 161 pounds, had a 2.3kWh battery and used third-party actuators. Musk also brought a newer model onstage that had metal casing on its torso and limbs and Tesla-built actuators. This model could not walk but was able to wave.
The 2022 and 2023 videos show Tesla has made considerable progress since announcing the launch of Optimus on the first AI Day in August 2021. Tesla is currently hiring deep learning, computer vision, motion planning, controls, mechanical, and general software engineers to develop Optimus. In 2022, Musk said Optimus had twice the economic output of a person.
Optimus will be available for sale in 3 to 5 years according to a timeline updated earlier this month.
The AI behind Optimus is developed by Tesla’s Autopilot team, which also creates self-driving software in Tesla vehicles. Optimus can operate autonomously, but the current version of Autopilot for vehicles requires active driver supervision.
Tesla develops neural networks for Autopilot by capturing and analyzing views from Tesla vehicle cameras. It collects information from millions of vehicles in real time to share data for object detection and depth estimation. One question is how Tesla may be gathering and using information captured from assembly robots now on its factory floors. These robots include the Godzilla, a large robot that moves car bodies to the factory’s paint line, robots that weld chassis castings and stamped parts, and automated stations that install different components ranging from HVAC systems to seats.
