Tesla chief Elon Musk has shared new footage of the company’s humanoid Optimus robot, along with an update on how development of the robot is progressing.
The video (above), which was shown during Tesla’s annual stockholder meeting on Thursday, shows Optimus walking at a steady pace and performing a task autonomously at a Tesla factory in which it places battery cells into crates.
“We’ve made a massive amount of progress with Optimus in a short period of time, from someone pretending to be a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodge-podgey robot, to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks in the factory today,” Musk told the audience.
He said they currently have two Optimus robots working in Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, performing the task with battery cells that’s shown in the video, adding that they also have “quite a few of these cruising around our offices in Palo Alto.”
Musk said that Optimus will undergo “one major hardware revision” that will be completed by the end of this year or early next, which will be followed by limited production of the robot for use in its factories, where it will be tested further.
He even predicted that next year Tesla will have “over a thousand, maybe a few thousand” Optimus robots working for the electric-car automaker, explaining that Tesla already has the production, engineering, and AI and software capabilities to make a success of the robot. It’s worth noting, however, that the Tesla CEO’s predictions often don’t meet his stated timeline.
While on this occasion Musk didn’t comment on how the robot will impact Tesla’s human workforce, he has said previously that Optimus would be used to “eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.”
The billionaire entrepreneur also said the robot will eventually become highly autonomous in a way that will let a human colleague give it instructions. The robot will even be able to learn a task simply by watching a video of it, Musk claimed.
And in a forecast they will concern those fearing a robot uprising, the Tesla chief also said that the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will eventually be greater than one to one, with Tesla “by far the leader in that.”
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