Billionaire Elon Musk announced that Tesla is building a 5’8 humanoid robot called Tesla Bot. The announcement was made as part of AI Day, a series of tech talks hosted by Tesla in California to recruit machine learning talent.
The Tesla bot will run on the same AI used by Tesla’s autonomous vehicles.
“Basically, if you think about what we’re doing right now with cars, Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Elon Musk said.
“With the Full Self-Driving computer, which will keep evolving, and Dojo and all the neural nets recognizing the world, understanding how to navigate through the world, it kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form.”
The bot is “intended to be friendly and navigate through a world built for humans,” he added. He also said they’re developing it so that humans can run away from it and overpower it easily. It’ll weigh 125 pounds and have a walking gait of 5 miles per hour, its head will be kitted out with the autopilot cameras used by Tesla’s vehicles to sense the environment and will contain a screen to display information
During the presentation, Musk showed the robot’s proposed specifications and also added that the Bots would eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks,” for example “go to the store and get … the following groceries” “Pick up that bolt”. He added, “Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it, you can, but you won’t need to do it.”
Musk said the robot fits seamlessly into Tesla’s mission and will be built with many of the same materials the company uses for its cars.
“We’re making the pieces that would be useful for [building] a humanoid robot, so we should probably make it. If we don’t someone else will – and we want to make sure it’s safe,” Musk said.
What you should know
Tesla is not the first company, to produce a humanoid robot. Honda, Toyota, and GM also have their own robots.
