How Tesla Bot Sees the World
Tesla’s AI day 2022 kicked off last Friday, and just like with last year, the company gave us a flood of new tech to sift through - and first up was the long awaited showcase of the Tesla Bot “Optimus”.
Wasting no time, CEO Elon Musk and his engineering team brought on a fully self-supporting - and walking - bot. They showcased movement, internal specifications, and the complexities of the Tesla Bot’s hand actuators. But the standout of the whole Optimus presentation was the section where the team showed off how Optimus sees and navigates the world.
The technicians and Musk briefly reminded the audience of what they wanted Optimus to do: repetitive or dangerous tasks, in and around human-occupied spaces. For that, the Tesla Bot would need a navigation system that would rely on the same spatial cues as we do - and luckily, they already had a system for that.
Oh yes, the Tesla Bot is going to be using the same system as Tesla uses for their cars: Autopilot. Instead of lidar and radar, the Tesla bot has three cameras that give it a full view of its surroundings; while the Tesla Autopilot system gives it shape recognition and edge detection so it can navigate, and interact with objects. And from the videos they showed, it’s actually working pretty well!
The other major point that could have been lost in all the dazzling technical displays, is their ideas about construction and scaling production of the Tesla Bot.
The original concept and first design platforms used “semi off-the-shelf” components. Elon’s idea for this robot is that it’s supposed to be a domestic helper, and so making it too expensive to produce just wouldn’t work out. This isn’t some technical display like a Boston Dynamics or Honda robot. Optimus is meant to be mass produced, and - like Tesla’s cars - out doing the job before any competitor even gets out of the concept phase.
The techs walked us through the iterative design process. They went from idea to first prototype in six months. Then to the second prototype in six months after that, designing for cost and efficiency - again, just like Tesla’s cars.
And this is really the sticking point, because it defines the whole Optimus showcase. The Tesla engineers needed to design a working robot - with emphasis on affordability and useability - and they had to do it before any other company - many of which had several years worth of a head start. So they looked at their cars, realised that they were already building these robots, and found a way to put them on two legs instead of four wheels. Genius.
That sort of thinking has given Tesla a humanoid robot that can walk under its own power and identify its surroundings properly in a little over a year. How long until it’s doing your dishes?