In case you’ve missed it, last weekend tech billionaire Elon Musk presented the latest prototype of a humanoid robot being developed by his Tesla electric car company. The robot, named Optimus, appeared on stage at a Silicon Valley event, where Tesla held their annual Tesla AI (artificial intelligence) Day presentation. Tesla’s AI Day is aimed at recruiting and showcasing their latest products/developments.
Initially, they revealed a deconstructed Optimus, who walked forward and did a “raise the roof” dance move. They also showed a few video clips of the robot doing other tasks like picking up boxes. Later on during the presentation Tesla’s team brought out another prototype on stage showing a version of Optimus with its body fully assembled but not fully functional. This prototype would be more similar to the production version and was held up on a stand and waved to the audience, showing the range of motion of its wrist and hand. Tesla’s mass-market robots will be tested by working jobs in the car factories, but the ultimate goal is to solve one of the toughest problems of artificial intelligence: making a machine that can replace a human.
Elon Musk mentioned during the presentation that Optimus is still a work-in-progress but could be on the market to the public in a few years’ time and is supposedly targeting a price of less than $20,000.
