Tesla will hold its AI Day 2 on September 30 and in the leadup, Elon Musk has prioritized both Optimus and an updated smart summon feature. According to the tech billionaire, both projects have an end-of-month deadline.
During Tesla’s first AI day it announced a number of projects including the Tesla Bot, also known as Optimus. At the time, the most tangible thing the company could produce was a dancing person dressed up to look like the robot. On September 30, Musk will need to show up with a lot more if he’s to silence critics.
Nancy Cooke, a professor in human systems engineering at Arizona State University, told Reuters that Tesla will need to show the robot doing unscripted actions, not just simple tricks. “If he just gets the robot to walk around, or he gets the robots to dance, that’s already been done. That’s not that impressive,” she said.
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Note, Autopilot/AI team is also working on Optimus and (actually smart) summon/autopark, which have end of month deadlines
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2022
Optimus is initially intended to be a robot that can stand in for humans who do repetitive or dangerous work. One of the biggest challenges such robots face is when something unexpected happens. Adjusting to that change in circumstances, sometimes however slight, can be too much for some robots to overcome. Musk is well aware of the challenges too.
Back in 2018, he specifically called out a challenge the Tesla team dealt with during production because of a robot that couldn’t properly handle picking up pieces of “fluff” and placing them on batteries. Unlike a rigid component, the fluff presented an unpredictable challenge and the robot struggled with it.
Critics have noted that Musk and Tesla are pursuing the very difficult challenge of bringing an artificially intelligent humanoid robot to the market despite the fact that Full Self-Driving still isn’t achieving its original goals. Back in 2019, Musk said that there would be over 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by now. Not only has that not happened, but it doesn’t seem like it’s very close either. Regardless, we’re excited to learn more at Tesla AI Day 2 on September 30.
