Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled an early prototype of humanoid robot 'Optimus' at the AI Day presentation last Friday at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Notably, Optimus demonstrated minimal mobility on stage by waving to the audience and raising its knees.
However, the audience was shown a video of the robot performing simple tasks, such as watering plants, carrying boxes and lifting metal bars.
Musk claimed that the difference between Tesla's design and other "very impressive humanoid robot demonstrations" is that Tesla's Optimus is made for mass production in "millions" of units and to be very capable.
These mass-market robots will be tested by working jobs in the car factories, said company engineers
Promisingly, the robot is expected to be priced at US$20,000 and is supposed to hit production in three to five years.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2022
Event highlights
During Friday’s presentation, Tesla demonstrated the potential capabilities the humanoid might have, including with Tesla-designed actuators, which are like the muscle of the robot, and adaptive robotic hands that will allow the robot to grasp and manipulate a wide range of objects.
“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible,” said Musk.
He adds: “Optimus is designed to be an extremely capable robot made in very high volume, probably ultimately millions of units and is expected to cost much less than a car.”
Besides the robot, the ‘AI day’ event also showcased the latest developments in the company’s automated driving software and the ‘Dojo’ supercomputer that the company uses to train its in-house artificial intelligence.
Musk said that Tesla may someday allow other companies to pay to use Dojo to train their own neural networks.
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 1, 2022