CEO Elon Musk has been telling shareholders that Optimus is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for the company.
Musk believes that Tesla is going to eventually produce tens of millions of Optimus robots per year.
Tesla is already using some robots inside its factory and Musk suggested that Tesla could start selling the robot to outside customers as soon as next year. He has been guiding a price between $25,000 and $30,000 per robot.
But as Musk’s lawyers have made so clear, this is all “corporate puffery” and the company is still very much in the development phase of the robot.
It has been sporadically releasing updates of the progress in making the robot more useful.
In December, we shared an update about the Tesla Optimus’ latest walking capacity, which showed improvements, but it showed capacity similar to what competition achieved almost a decade earlier.
Tesla has now released a new video showing an Optimus prototype dancing:
Milan Kovac, Tesla’s head of the Optimus program, commented on the video:
While the progress is impressive, it looks like Tesla is still very much catching up to the competition.
And since then, it has released much more impressive videos of its robots doing martial arts, jumping, and even doing flips.
There has been a surge of companies working on humanoid robots, and there have been clear advancements in this field. We were particularly impressed by Tesla’s latest hands for Optimus.
However, robotics isn’t the main bottleneck to making humanoid robots useful.
This is a demonstration of what movements the latest robotics can support, but all of Tesla’s demonstrations of Optimus robots doing actually useful things were powered by human assistance.
In short, Optimus still has the same problem as Tesla’s “self-driving” vehicles: they need human assistance.
Source: Electrek