Well, now we’ve seen it: the Optimus humanoid robot that Elon Musk has been talking about for the past year. On Friday, at Tesla’s “AI Day” —actually a misnomer, since the event was held in the evening California time—the billionaire
introduced a working prototype of the robot, which he envisions will one day do a wide variety of helpful tasks in people’s homes.
Although Musk has spent a lot of time
hyping the Optimus—saying it will help to usher in an age in which robots and A.I.-enabled software perform most of the economically useful work now done by humans—just before he unveiled the new robot he tried to tamp down expectations for what people were about to witness. After all, he told the audience, last year all Tesla had managed to show off with regards to the Optimus was a
human dancer dressed like a robot. Now they at least had a working machine, he said. “Compared to that it is going to be very impressive,” he said. And then one of Musk’s assistants noted that it was the first time Tesla was trying the bipedal robot without any kind of mechanical support to ensure it did not topple over.
The robot—this version, which Tesla calls Bumble C, was built largely using motors, acutators and other parts from third-party vendors and using A.I. computer vision and navigation software adapted from Tesla’s own Autopilot advanced driver assistance software—stepped hesitantly onto the stage and waved to the audience. It even did a little dab-like dance. “The robot can actually do a lot more than what we just showed you,” Musk said. “We just didn’t want it to fall on its face.” He then showed videos of the robot performing a few tasks: carrying boxes in a warehouse and office, placing the box on a desk, picking up a watering can and watering some plants, and picking up some metal parts in a Tesla factory.
Musk then showed off a slightly slicker-looking version of the Optimus that had been built using Tesla-designed parts. “It wasn’t quite ready to walk, but it should be ready to walk in a few weeks,” he said. It dutifully was wheeled out on a kind of stand and waved. Musk said the Optimus would ultimately be made in “millions of units” and would cost “much less than a car”—less than $20,000, he said.
So how impressed should we be with the Optimus? Most roboticists were underwhelmed. On
Twitter, Cynthia Yeung, a roboticist at Plus One Robotics, which builds software for logistics robots,
wrote: “None of this is cutting edge. Hire some PhDs and go to some robotics conferences @Tesla.”
In the technical journal IEEE Spectrum, the publication’s senior editor and long-time robotics-watcher Evan Ackerman
wrote:
“
While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the humanoid robot that Musk very briefly demonstrated on stage, there’s nothing uniquely right, either. We were hoping for (if not necessarily expecting) more from Tesla. And while the robot isn’t exactly a disappointment, there’s very little to suggest that it disrupts robotics the way that SpaceX did for rockets or Tesla did for electric cars.”