Elon Musk Says Tesla's Humanoid Optimus Robot Could Launch Next

Tesla could start selling its humanoid Optimus robot by the end of next year and one day will rake in more cash from robots than cars, CEO Elon Musk told investors on Tuesday, another ambitious claim from the billionaire that experts said might just be within the realm of possibility-though is highly unlikely to make the carmaker any money in the near future. Hubicki said there are several unknowns surrounding the humanoid robots of Tesla and its competitors like Boston Dynamics and Figure AI that are critical to evaluating their potential for use in the real world outside of glitzy, carefully staged demo videos. Foremost among these is reliability, he said, adding that “the only useful robot is a reliable robot.” Hubicki said this “is a problem for humanoids,” where control is still in the laboratory phase and hardware is fragile. “Will they work 90% of the time? 99%? How many 9’s are enough before they’re more useful in your production line than they are a hassle to fix and babysit? Those are the numbers I’d want to know from a humanoids company.”Most of the built world is designed for humans and humanoid robots, by design, are well suited to this. While work environments and tasks can be challenging for robots with wheels or other designs to navigate, a humanoid could feasibly thrive and undertake kinds of work that are otherwise limited to humans or very specific machinery. The design imposes a number of formidable technical challenges for both hardware and software, including tasks most humans take for granted like movement and grasping objects. The current boom in AI is helping to drive the field forward, Aitken said, as generalizability is crucial to making humanoids viable tools. “We can't program a robot to pick up 1000 different objects by programming a process for each one individually,” he explainedIt’s tough to imagine Musk’s claim that Optimus will one day overshadow Tesla’s other products will be realized at any point in the near future, robotics experts told Forbes, particularly its cars. Garg said humanoids are “unlikely to be cashflow positive anytime soon” and despite the hype, they lack a convincing use case that other emerging technologies like driverless cars have. They “will not likely come close to the car business in terms of revenue” for the next decade, he said. Aitken told Forbes “it's hard to see a humanoid competing seriously with the large industrial players in the sector” and questions whether they’d be able to do the kinds of “high-value, dull, dirty and dangerous” work that would motivate a company to invest. Hubicki said he “would not bet on that market approaching automotives for the foreseeable future.” While humanoid bots have “progressed impressively” in recent years, he said they lack a compelling use case suggesting “a massive market is imminent” and at the moment remain “a complicated technology for completing tasks we can already do better.
All data is taken from the source: forbes.com
Article Link: www.forbes.com/sites/robertha...
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