What Elon Musk’s robot assistant can do (and how).

They took center stage, dancing and interacting with the audience present during the presentation of Tesla’s new robotaxis, showing off their capabilities and ‘skills’, currently limited but in continuous development. We are talking about Tesla …

What Elon Musk's robot assistant can do (and how).

They took center stage, dancing and interacting with the audience present during the presentation of Tesla’s new robotaxis, showing off their capabilities and ‘skills’, currently limited but in continuous development. We are talking about Tesla Optimus, the humanoid robot on which the company led by Elon Musk has been working for some time now.

Tesla’s assistant robot

The tycoon of South African origin had announced his intention to create and produce a human-like bot as early as 2021; the following year, in October 2022, it officially presented the first prototype, already capable of moving and performing elementary actions.

Another twelve months of experimentation have allowed an exponential growth in Optimus’ capabilities: a video, shared on the company’s social networks, dates back to September 2023, in which the ‘droid’ already demonstrated that it was able to independently calibrate its arms and legs, order and sort colored blocks , carry out corrective actions independently, as well as balance on one leg, apply oneself to the practice of yoga and even move in a controlled manner.

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Giant strides, with the aim, Musk had explained, of making his automatons marketable on the market within 3-5 years, or in any case by 2030, and then using them in the most disparate areas of work, from the manufacturing industry to logistics, up to home care. In this sense, the description that Tesla itself uses to officially describe its revolutionary product fits perfectly: “A multipurpose, bipedal humanoid robot capable of carrying out dangerous, repetitive or boring tasks”.

The last official presentation dates back to December 2023, that of the new Optimus Gen 2 prototype, the new generation of the Tesla Bot, further enhanced thanks to artificial intelligence. The robot, with the new upgrades, was able to perform bends on its legs and could count on new actuators and sensors developed directly by Tesla. Not only that: he was able to handle eggs without breaking them, also demonstrating his skills as a ‘home chef’. A few months ago, Musk had therefore announced the use of some Tesla Bots within his own companies, documenting everything with a video published on X.

Up to $48 per hour for training

In recent months, Tesla has committed itself to making its robot more and more ‘human’, and has done so by hiring, and paying up to 48 dollars an hour, people willing to wear suits for several hours motion capture to make the training of your creature more effective. The volunteers’ job is to work together with the robots during their development.

Specifically, they walked along test routes and carried out tasks while wearing the specifically designed suit and a virtual reality viewer, for work shifts that could last up to 7 hours. The workers’ task is also to analyze the information collected and draw up daily reports, to train the artificial intelligence system underlying the prototypes, in addition to remote control of the humanoid bot.

The evolution of Musk’s humanoid assistant

It was Milan Kovac, an engineer who has been working on the development of Optimus since the beginning, who recently explained the evolution of Tesla’s droid, with a post on X. “We went from an exploratory prototype (Bumblebee/cee, ed.) to a more stable platform, designed by Tesla (Optimus Gen-1),” he explained.

In this phase, the robot’s locomotion was improved, avoiding falls and implementing the gait speed, which is increasingly similar to that of humans. During the same period, “some of the first end-to-end neural networks for humanoid robots to autonomously perform tasks requiring coordinated control of the humanoid torso, arms, and full hands with fingers” were also trained and deployed. Next came the updated version of the bot (Optimus Gen-2), which added an articulated neck, revamped hands with tactile sensing, and tighter integration of harnesses, actuators, and electronics.

What made this sudden development possible? “A fantastic group of passionate people – wrote Kovac – a gritty, flexible and bureaucracy-free operational structure, a large-scale AI training and evaluation infrastructure and years of previous work on the technological foundations for our cars , on actuators, batteries, AI chips and Autopilot software”.