Musk previews Tesla’s humanoid robot

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday (Sep 30) showed off a prototype of humanoid robot Optimus, predicting that the electric vehicle maker would be able to produce millions of them and sell them for under US$20,000 – less than a third of the price of a Model Y.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done to refine Optimus and prove it,” Musk said at the electric vehicle maker’s AI Day event being held at a Tesla office in Palo Alto, California, where the robot was showcased.

A prototype model that Tesla said was developed in February walked out to wave at the crowd on Friday, and Tesla showed a video of it doing simple tasks, such as watering plants, carrying boxes and lifting metal bars at a production station at the company’s California plant.

The team rolled out the more streamlined current generation bot on a cart and Musk said he hoped that it would be able to walk itself soon.

He said that existing humanoid robots are “missing a brain” – and the ability to solve problems on their own. By contrast, he said, Optimus would be an “extremely capable robot” that Tesla would aim to produce in the millions.

He said he expected it would cost less than US$20,000.

Musk and Tesla representatives acknowledged that there was a lot of work to be done to achieve the goal of a mass-produced, low-cost robot using Tesla-designed technology that would be capable of replacing humans at work.

Other automakers, including Toyota and Honda, have developed humanoid robot prototypes capable of doing complicated things like shooting a basketball, and production robots from ABB and others are a mainstay of auto manufacturing.

At an event in 2019, Musk promised 1 million robotaxis by 2020, but has yet to deliver such a car.