Tesla Likely to Launch Humanoid Robot Next Year, Says Elon Musk
After dominating the electric vehicle market and making his way into the billionaire space race, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the latest castle he's aiming to conquer: humanoid robots.
Chief Executive of Tesla; Elon Musk spoke on the Tesla AI event that the electric automaker will probably launch a humanoid prototype robot next which he dubbed as ‘Tesla Bot’ and claims its designed to perform dangerous, repetitive and boring work that people don’t like to do. "Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels," he said. "It kind of makes sense to put that into a humanoid form."
He revealed that it will be based on the same technologies that his company used to build the semi-autonomous Tesla cars, he added that the aim to create this bot is to eliminate the tasks that people would rather not do and he added that manual labor will become a ‘choice’ for the people if they manage to successfully launch this into the market. "I think essentially in the future physical work will be a choice," he said.
The ‘Tesla Bot’ will stand 5’8 feet (1.7m) above the ground and will weigh approximately 125 pounds (56 KG). He said that the ‘Tesla Bot’ will have five fingered hands, will come in two classic black and white colors, he went on to say that the bot will be programmed to be ‘friendly’ and he jested about the people fear the robot uprising and reassured them that its build quality will be such that “you can run away from it…….and most likely overpower it”. He joked that; “Hopefully it won’t happen, but you never know”.
The specs of the bot reinforce Musk’s statement; it can reach a top speed of 5 MPH (8 KPH), carry a weight of 45 pounds (20.45 KG), a deadlift of 150 pounds (68 KG), and an arm extend lift of 10 pounds (4.5 KG). Similarly, like the tesla cars, it will have full self-drive hardware (self-walk in this case), and it will be equipped with eight cameras and a high-quality screen on its head.
The tasks this robot will perform that are set by Musk and Tesla are trivial but essential such as “picking up groceries, attaching a bolt to a car with a wrench or ordinary labor”. Ideally, it is planned that these robots be added into the workforce so they can fill the gaps in the industries so there are enough workers to go around even if it means they are lifeless dolls.
To explain his thoughts, Elon Musk puts forward the question as to what economy actually is; "What is economy? It is, at the foundation, it is labor," Musk said. "What happens when there is no shortage of labor?". Adding the Tesla Bots, code named ‘Optimus’ to the economy will flourish it, the tesla owner says that the robot could have “Profound implications on the economy”. He also mentioned that pricing of the machine would also not be ground breaking because it is important that people are able to afford it.
The robot is as claimed by Musk to be fully capable of ordinary tasks but Tesla doesn’t have a great record of fulfilling his heavy promises. Formerly, Tesla has been accused of misleading people into believing the so-called auto-pilot vehicles can drive themselves but there have been multiple incidents where the Tesla cars have failed to read the traffic and bumped into them, though Musk has defended these claims. This controversy was not discussed in the online conference that was held for the announcement of ‘Optimus’, or brought up during the questions from the audience.
Instead, Musk pledged that his future robot would be a benign presence. Musk concluded his stream by; "I can safely say that it will be much longer than 10 years before a humanoid bot from any company on the planet can go to the store and get groceries for you."
Let’s see how Tesla fares to this ‘robotic’ challenge and what future holds for the self-described ‘Technoking’.
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