Optimus Enters Proto-Production
A new job opening posted by Tesla indicates that the Optimus robot project is moving on to some pre-production work.
“Proto Production Supervisor, Humanoid Actuators, Tesla Bot” reads the title of the job listing. The position will be a leadership one - having a team of 15 technicians to organize - but also working with the Actuator Program Manager to create build plans for Tesla’s internal actuator project.
Back in July we got a quick explanation from CEO Elon Musk about what had been holding up the project during the Q2 earnings call. He explained that while the initial tests with Optimus had attempted to use off-the-shelf parts, the team quickly discovered that they had to design their own actuators as off-the-shelf units weren’t sensitive enough.
And then in September, we got our first look at the results of that work - with a video showing some extremely impressive and intricate work being done by one of the company’s active bots.
Actuators are the motors, the drive units, and gear train of any robotic hardware - so it makes sense that Tesla would be putting a lot of effort into developing state-of-the-art units for their bots. Actuators in the joints and manipulation points like the hands have to be finely tuned to avoid juddering, shaky motion.
So posting a job like a Production Supervisor - whose whole job will be to create and fine-tune the process by which these actuators will eventually be mass produced - is an indication that Tesla is close enough to being finished with the design of their actuators, that they can begin that sort of planning.
But this job will not be easy - even by Tesla standards.
Actuators are very precise, finely-tuned parts - and in a robot like Optimus, many of the smaller parts of the gear train will be quite small. It’s also unclear exactly how Tesla plans on scaling up the production of their actuators - they could attempt to automate the process, which carries its own challenges - or they could stick with what they’ve been doing up until now, which is using highly skilled technicians to hand make each one.
It’s very likely the company intends on automating at least part of this process - but exactly how they achieve this will be the job of whoever lands this Production Supervisor gig. From the job description, it looks like Tesla is focusing on streamlining the current process while looking for opportunities to prepare for larger scale production so, it’ll likely be some time before we see a working prodcution line of these units.