The Optimus humanoid robot prototype has finally been revealed by Tesla on its AI Day 2022.
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| Tesla Optimus humanoid robot prototype revealed |
Tesla is always reaching for the sky. This time, it jumped pretty high. On the occasion of its AI Day 2022, which happens on September 30th, Tesla unveiled Optimus, a humanoid robot, that will make it on the market for “less than $20,000.”
This project was first announced on Tesla’s AI Day in 2021 as Optimus or Tesla Bot. The company then didn’t have anything to show and presented a dancer in Tesla Bot spandex unitard on stage.
The 2022 event started with an unveiling of the working prototype of the humanoid robot. At the event, there were two prototypes to be revealed. First was Bumble C which is the first version of the bot. In this robot are fitted “semi-off-the-shelves” actuators. This robot helped Tesla is designing their very first robot with in-house parts.
This Bumble C robot’s show wasn’t too exciting. It walked around the stage and waved at the crowd. The Tesla guys had a video of the robot doing more than that to show its usefulness but in a controlled environment. The clip showed the machine doing a task at the Fremont factory. All this was about Bumble C. Then came the first generation Optimus robot.
The reason for making the highlight of the show go second is that this guy couldn’t walk just yet. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, said that Optimus robot should be able to walk within some weeks. He had the robot now in the show as this is the version that would be going into production.
Optimus too didn’t do much other than wave at the audience. It had to be carried off by Tesla employees at the end. Musk said that this version had Tesla-designed actuators, battery packs, and power electronics and this is only a “rough development robot.” The robot should be walking without any support in Palo Alto. The first prototype of this Optimus humanoid robot was ready in February 2022.
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Changes made in the Optimus robot prototype
To start AI Day 2022, Musk said “We’re going to talk about the advancements in AI for Full Self-Driving, as well as how they apply more generally to real-world AI problems like a humanoid robot and even going beyond that. I think there’s some potential that what we’re doing here at Tesla could make a meaningful contribution to AGI [artificial general intelligence].”
Musk continued, “And I think actually Tesla’s a good entity to do it, from a governance standpoint, because we’re a publicly-traded company with one class of stock. That means that the public controls Tesla, and I think that’s actually a good thing. So if I go crazy, you can fire me — this is important. Maybe I’m not crazy.”
You’d remember that Musk had co-founded an AI business before called OpenAI, which he later quit. These guys had said that they had trained neural networks to allow a robot hand, which looked like a human hand, to solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle.
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Optimus Robot Specs
Some specs of Optimus robot were shared at the event. This robot has a 2.3 kWh battery pack, supposedly good for an entire day. The same “self-driving computer” that is there in Tesla vehicles is here as well. Milan Kovac, the Director of Engineering for Autopilot at Tesla according to his LinkedIn profile, said that the company’s endeavors in developing driver assistance systems for Tesla vehicles, like computer vision systems, would help them in developing robot AI.
There are 28 structural actuators, and the hands have 11 degrees of freedom.
The Autopilot team of Tesla was using manual data annotation for the identification of objects in short videos of the sensors and cameras on Tesla’s vehicles. And these would do a fair job. This fed into Tesla’s neural network and improved driver assistance systems which allowed an increase in the advancement of safer automatic driving.
There was a general specification about the Optimus robot at first in the event, and then the event moved towards the development of AI in this robot. One major aim of Tesla for this AI Day is recruitment. They want to invite people who’d be interested in what they are doing to work there.
The difference, Musk insists, between all the showy robots that retain a high similarity to the human form is that those are all one-off products. Tesla’s efforts are focused on the direction of designing a robot that can be mass-produced, so to speak. There’s one more advantage. It’s that this robot will have Tesla’s own AI, whose strength is that it’s a self-driving technology.
Musk believes that the company can enable the Optimus robot to navigate and solve real-world problems and tasks. Elon Musk had also issued a bold claim some time back, which he now reiterated. Optimus can bring about a “fundamental change in civilization as we know it.” This it will do by “ending poverty” by improving the economic output of industries.
As mentioned above, Musk wants this robot to cost “less than $20,000.” We don’t know when this would be possible, but recently, he said that Tesla would do this as soon as next year.
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