2/26/2022- 9:41 a.m.
Tesla AI Day event’s highlight (at least visually) was without a doubt Elon Musk’s announcement that a Tesla Bot prototype is coming in 2022.
It was the last announcement in the three hour-long presentation, and its beginning was quite bizarre as an actual human being pretending to be a humanoid robot walked on stage and started making robot moves and dance routines.
Things got pretty serious after that, though, when Musk took the mic and announced that a Tesla Bot (codenamed Optimus) will be real, and a prototype will come “sometime next year” looking like the mockup shown on stage.
Starting with the motivation behind such a complex project, Musk said that Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company, seeing as its cars are like “semi-sentient robots on wheels.”
At the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit, Musk also stated that the Tesla Bot could address labor shortage issues. He further explained that rapidly declining birthrates were a risk for civilization.
At the Q4 2021 earnings call, Musk said that Optimus or (Optimus Sub-prime’s) first job would most likely be at Tesla factories. Thus far, Tesla’s work on its humanoid robot seems to be moving along as scheduled.
After revealing its venture into humanoid robots during AI Day last year, Tesla announced that a prototype of Optimus would be unveiled by 2022. Tesla certainly didn’t seem to waste time forming a team to work on the humanoid robot.
In the same month the Tesla Bot was announced, the head of Tesla’s Mobile Robotics, Chris Walti, started looking for engineers and technicians to add to the humanoid robot program. By November 2021, Tesla posted even more job openings for the initiative.
