At Tesla’s annual 2022 Artificial Intelligence Day late Friday, the company unveiled a prototype of its highly anticipated humanoid robot Optimus Optimus. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Optimus will sell for less than $20,000, warning that the robot still has a long way to go to achieve its full functionality.
Speaking at an artificial intelligence day in Palo Alto, California, Elon Musk stressed, “There’s still a lot of work to do to improve Optimus Prime and prove its value.” Elon Musk said existing humanoid robots “lack brains” and the ability to solve problems independently. By contrast, he said, Optimus Prime will be an “extremely capable robot,” and Tesla aims to mass-produce millions of them. The robot is expected to cost less than $20,000, he said.
Tesla said the company had developed a prototype robot in February this year. At the event, the prototype Optimus Prime came to the front of the stage and waved to the crowd. This prototype robot skeleton was exposed and the wires and hardware were clearly visible. Tesla also showed a video showing the prototype robot completing simple tasks such as watering plants, carrying boxes and lifting metal poles in a workshop at Tesla’s California factory. “This is the first time a robot has walked on stage tonight without a tether,” Elon Musk said. “We don’t want it to fall on its face just yet.”
Both Elon Musk and Tesla employees acknowledge that there is still much work to be done to achieve the goal of mass-producing low-cost machines that will replace human jobs.
Other automakers, including Toyota and Honda, have previously developed prototypes of humanoid robots capable of complex tasks like playing basketball. Similarly, production robots from ABB and other companies are already a mainstay of the auto manufacturing industry.
But Tesla is the only company working to launch robots for the general public. Tesla staff also showed off its newly designed next-generation Tesla robot at the event, but unlike the prototype that walked onto the stage on its own, this robot was pushed onto the stage by a trio of people. Tesla said the robot will use Tesla-designed components, including a 2.3 kWh battery pack mounted on the robot’s torso, a chip system and motors that drive the robot’s limbs to move, and so on. The entire robot is designed to weigh 73 kilograms.
“It’s not quite ready to walk yet. But I think it will be walking within a few weeks,” Elon Musk said. He hopes the robot can be mass-produced, selling for less than $ 20,000, and has all the fingers can move freely and other features, so that it can operate tools.
Elon Musk said the “AI Day” event was held to recruit more employees for the company, and that the engineers on stage were catering to the needs of the technicians in attendance. Tesla engineers described in detail how Tesla designed the robot’s hands and used collision simulator technology developed by Tesla to test features such as how to avoid injury if the robot’s face hits the ground.
Elon Musk has previously spoken about the risks of artificial intelligence, saying that the mass introduction of robots has the potential to “change civilization” and create “a future of abundance, a future without poverty. That’s when people …… can get anything they want in terms of products and services.” But he said Tesla shareholders have an important role to play in monitoring the company’s behavior.
“If I go crazy, you can fire me,” Elon Musk said. “It’s very important.”
Previously Elon Musk has stressed that the company can ensure the safety of its robots. “Obviously, we’re making the parts needed for a practical humanoid robot, so I think we should probably build it,” he said last year. “If we don’t, somebody else will. …… I think we should do that and make sure it’s safe.”
Many investors and financial analysts have expressed skepticism that Tesla could eventually build such a robot, suggesting that the focus should be on Tesla’s core business such as electric cars.
Friday’s demonstration at Artificial Intelligence Day showed how Elon Musk wants to solve one of the toughest problems in robotics and artificial intelligence: how to build a machine that can replace a human.
For years, companies including Amazon and Google have been working to develop robots that move autonomously, but things like picking up or handling objects with robotic hands are not easy, and the idea that robots can replace human employees is far from a reality.
The robots developed by Tesla demonstrate the company’s long-term strategy to build an automated future. In such a future, computer algorithms are involved in human-like decision-making and can enrich their work experience and theoretical knowledge on their own.
As labor shortages lead to large numbers of manufacturing job openings, companies are conceiving new ways to automate jobs previously performed by humans. Despite the controversy, it would certainly be a breakthrough if a company cracked the method of making humanoid robots.
Gene Munster, managing partner at investment firm Loup Ventures, wrote in an analysis that if the Tesla Optimus robot becomes a reality, it could initially affect manufacturing jobs that account for about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce and are worth up to $500 billion a year.
“The global manual labor market would also be many times larger than the U.S. manufacturing labor market,” he added.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk has always over-promised and always pushed back the timing of his product announcements. 2019 saw the announcement of Tesla’s Cyber electric pickup truck, with windows, that Elon Musk said were “unbreakable,” only to have them knocked out during a demonstration. Tesla has not yet started delivering the Cyber electric pickup. On Thursday, Elon Musk said on Twitter that the pickup would be “waterproof enough to be used temporarily as a boat”.
Tesla also discussed its long-delayed self-driving technology at the event. Engineers developing self-driving software described how they train the software to make decisions, such as when to blend into traffic, and how to speed up the computer’s processing.
In May, Elon Musk said that if Tesla could not achieve full self-driving capabilities, the company’s future “value would be essentially zero. But Tesla’s self-driving technology is facing increasing regulatory investigations and technical hurdles.
Elon Musk has said he expects Tesla to achieve fully autonomous driving this year and mass produce robotic cabs without steering wheels and pedals in 2024.
At the 2019 Autopilot Day event, Elon Musk promised to have 1 million robot cabs on the road by 2020, but so far no such cars have been delivered.
