Elon Promised Me a Man in a Morph Suit & All I Got was a Dumb Robot
Last year some Twitter user called Elon Musk promised the world robots, a world first. He made this promise after a showcase featuring a dude in a morph suit dancing around showing the products potential. Musk is big on promises, so everyone held off as best they could from having any expectations at all about Tesla’s robots. He said that a prototype would probably be ready by 2022, and Now a year later Elon has presented the work in progress so far, and it’s… It’s ok I guess. That’s been the general tone surrounding the reveal so far of Optimus, a humanoid everyday utility bot. The prototype we got to see was cobbled together mostly from off the shelf parts, but it’s a bold first step none-the-less.
“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible.” Musk said.
The most generous accolades from pundits is that the Tesla Engineers have pulled off an impressive speedrun getting a bipedal robot tottering on stage in such a short period of time. This rush job has meant that there may be a sever lack of imagination employed at this stage, with one expert talking to the Verge noting that the first two Optimus prototypes looked like Honda’s Asimo robots.
It’s five fingered humanoid appearance shows a dedication to form over function as well, But this may pay off down the line if Tesla was hoping to create a mechanical tool that could slot seamlessly into our prexisting infrastructure. Sure having eight arms with three fingers a piece might be great for multitasking, but it’d get pretty bulky walking down a hallway.
The dream is that these will be general purpose robots sold at a quite reasonable $20,000 each. You can compare that to Boston Dynamics Spot dog robot which would set you back about $74,500.
While the robot in it’s current derpy form isn’t particularly revolutionary, there’s always going to be room for improvement and groundbreaking problem solving down the line. Elon has the fiscal resources to do big things, and the robots are going to be taking advantage of Tesla’s navigational systems. So hypothetically these things will have the ability to improve their pathing and navigation as well as any Tesla car, which are currently able to run over crash test dummy children at up to a clocked speed of 347km/h.
So what was the goal of showing us where Tesla is at right now? Musk’s trying to lure talent. “Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal” of Tesla’s AI Day he said on twitter.
Musk admits that what we saw was obviously not market ready, but expected it to be within a few years. “The robot can actually do a lot more than we just showed you — we just didn’t want it to fall on its face.”
