Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, demonstrated a prototype of its humanoid robot ‘Optimus,’ which waved to a delighted crowd during the company’s artificial intelligence event on Friday. Musk plans to produce “millions” of Optimus and sell them for less than $20,000 within three to five years.
Tesla AI Day 2022 was held on Friday to demonstrate how far the company’s research on autonomous robots and vehicles has progressed. The event provided us with the first look at the Optimus robot, updates on self-driving software, and a first glance at the Dojo hardware powering Tesla’s AI research.
Everything about Optimus – Tesla’s Humanoid Robot
- The operational version of the Optimus was shown after a little delay. It weighs 73kg, has a 2.3kWh battery, and can walk and wave on its own with the help of third-party actuators. The second Optimus model was unveiled to tease the audience, a sleeker form with metal casing covering its torso and limbs and Tesla-built actuators.
- Tesla’s Autopilot team said that the company has come a long way with Full Self Driving, which has grown from 2,000 Tesla drivers last year to 1,60,000 this year. It is presently only available in Canada and the United States, though Musk claimed that if no regulatory issues arising in each nation, they would expand globally.
- Tesla is building a massive, custom-built hardware stack known as Dojo to train its AI on all of the footage that it’s cars collect and send back to the company. Tesla’s technology was dense in order to give the horsepower required by the AI team to churn through a 30 Petabyte footage vault.
Tesla, Inc. is a transnational American automotive and clean energy corporation located in Austin, Texas. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning are the founders of Tesla. Tesla Motors was established in July 2003. The inspiration behind the name of the company Tesla is an inventor, and electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla. Elon Musk became the company’s largest stakeholder with a $6.5 million investment made in February 2004. He also became the CEO of Tesla in 2008. Musk claims that Tesla’s goal is to hasten the transition to environmentally friendly energy and transportation, using solar energy and electric vehicles as the primary sources. Tesla’s first automobile model, the Roadster sports car, began its production in 2009.
Tesla designs and manufactures electric vehicles, residential and grid-scale battery energy storage, solar panels, solar roof tiles, and related products and services. With a market value of more than US$840 billion, Tesla is one of the world’s most valuable corporations and the world’s most valuable automaker. The company had the greatest global sales of battery electric vehicles and plug-in electric vehicles in 2021, accounting for 21% of the battery-electric market and 14% of the plug-in market (which includes plug-in hybrids). The company produces and installs solar panels in the United States through its subsidiary Tesla Energy. Tesla Energy ranked among the top suppliers of battery energy storage systems globally in 2021 with 3.99 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of installed systems.
Tesla will begin testing Optimus on manufacturing floors, performing rudimentary duties such as carrying parts, and the robots will be available to the general public in three to five years.
Tesla is not the only automaker that has experimented with humanoid robots. Honda Motor and Toyota Motor have also developed prototypes of a humanoid robot that can carry out challenging jobs. ABB and other manufacturers’ production robots are a mainstay of vehicle manufacturing. However, Tesla is the only company striving for a mass-market robot that might potentially be employed in factories.
Interestingly, Elon Musk tweeted shortly after introducing the Optimus that there will be a catgirl version of the Optimus robot. It’s impossible to know whether Musk was serious or not, but in response to a query during the Q&A, he hinted that Optimus may have multiple appearances. Tesla’s aim is to have incredibly exciting variations of Optimus. They will also create different versions of the robot
