Fri 20 August 2021:
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc, announced on Thursday that the company plans to deploy a prototype of a humanoid robot named “Tesla Bot” next year, claiming that the robot will “reduce dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks.”
“We’re also good at sensors and batteries and we’ll probably have a prototype next year that looks like this,” Musk said, shortly after an actor in a body suit designed to look like the Tesla robot gyrated wildly on stage. He remarked that the actor was not a real robot, but “the Tesla Bot will be real.”
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The robot with a human-like appearance would carry out the work people like to do least, with “profound implications for the economy,” Musk said at the company’s AI Day event on Thursday.
Musk said the robot, code-named “Optimus,” is based on the same chips and sensors that Tesla’s cars use for self-driving features. It’s five foot eight inches tall, and has a screen where the head is for useful information, Musk said. Tesla is designing it so that humans will be able to run away from the robot or overpower it.
Slides displayed by Tesla on Thursday show that Autopilot cameras will be installed in the bot’s head. It will be able to carry 45 pounds, lift 150 pounds, and weighs 125 pounds. It can run 5 miles per hour, Musk said.
Musk said the robot was not intended to help with Tesla’s manufacturing, but that Tesla is developing a lot of the computers needed for robotics, so it makes sense for Tesla to build a robot.
“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” Musk said.
Tesla unveiled at the event chips it designed in-house for its fast computer, Dojo, to train its automated driving system.
Musk said Dojo would be operational next year.
A few years ago, Musk asked Tesla engineers “to design a superfast training computer and that’s how we started Project Dojo,” Tesla director Ganesh Venkataramanan said at the AI Day event.
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