Tesla has shared a video of the progress of its Optimus humanoid robot, but it still looks like it is catching up to the competition.
CEO Elon Musk has been telling shareholders that Optimus is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for the company.
Musk believes that Tesla is going to eventually produce tens of millions of Optimus robots per year.
Tesla is already using some robots inside its factory and Musk suggested that Tesla could start selling the robot to outside customers as soon as next year. He has been guiding a price between $25,000 and $30,000 per robot.
But as Musk’s lawyers have made so clear, this is all “corporate puffery” and the company is still very much in the development phase of the robot.
It has been sporadically releasing updates of the progress in making the robot more useful.
In December, we shared an update about the Tesla Optimus’ latest walking capacity, which showed improvements, but it showed capacity similar to what competition achieved almost a decade earlier.
Tesla has now released a new video showing an Optimus prototype dancing:
Milan Kovac, Tesla’s head of the Optimus program, commented on the video:
More coming shortly! The team has been working very hard in the background. Entirely trained in simulation with RL. Many optimizations and fixes have been put in place in our sim-to-real training code.
While the progress is impressive, it looks like Tesla is still very much catching up to the competition.
Unitree released a similar video of its humanoid robot dancing months ago:
And since then, it has released much more impressive videos of its robots doing martial arts, jumping, and even doing flips.
There has been a surge of companies working on humanoid robots, and there have been clear advancements in this field. We were particularly impressed by Tesla’s latest hands for Optimus.
However, robotics isn’t the main bottleneck to making humanoid robots useful.
This is a demonstration of what movements the latest robotics can support, but all of Tesla’s demonstrations of Optimus robots doing actually useful things were powered by human assistance.
In short, Optimus still has the same problem as Tesla’s “self-driving” vehicles: they need human assistance.
Electrek’s Take
Top comment by gary oblock
The problem with these robots is getting them to easily and reliably do useful things while all while being safe around other things and people. In a nutshell they need to be very close to having artificial general intelligence and that is insanely difficult to do.
Figure, X1, Unitree, Xpeng, and many others. The humanoid robot space is getting big. I am fairly bullish on humanoid robots, but I don’t think Tesla has a lead in the space.
I think the space needs to keep improving robotics so that they are ready when AI becomes smooth enough to be useful when integrated into such robots.
Tesla is indeed making progress on that front, but I have yet to see proof that they are ahead of the other companies I just mentioned.
On the contrary, I’m concerned by the fact that Tesla was not forthcoming about the human assistance behind the demonstration at the ‘We, Robot’ event.
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