This is Tesla Bot, Elon Musk's new humanoid robot.
Apparently, Tesla isn't just busy building self-driving cars and luxury cars with year-and-a-half-long waiting lists. This has become clear thanks to the new announcement of Elon Musk, who has revealed his new project: the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot weighing almost 57 kilos pounds and 1.76 meters tall, which will be launched next year.
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After the announcement, Musk wanted to reassure anyone who grew up watching movies about killer robots: "We're configuring it in such a way that it's possible to run away from it. Chances are anyone can handle it."
The Tesla Bot is designed to automate repetitive tasks, and to create a future where physical labor is a choice rather than a requirement. Tesla Bot will, according to Musk, be able to perform extremely complex and challenging tasks for a robot, such as obeying a command to lift a bolt and fasten it to a machine with a wrench. Musk recognizes that it will eventually have implications in the world of work, which is why he believes that universal basic income will be a necessity.
Why in human form
It is intended to be friendly and able to move around a world built for humans. At 56 kilograms it has a payload capacity of just over 20 kilograms, making it not a military or industrial threat. The top speed will be only eight km/h and the payload capacity with arms outstretched will be only 4.5 kilograms. However, the Tesla Bot will make a dead weight of 68 kilograms.
Musk sees this as a logical step for the innovative car company. "Tesla is arguably the largest robotics company in the world, because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels," Musk said. "With the full autonomous computer, the inference engine in the car, which we will continue to evolve obviously, neural networks, ability to recognize the world and understand how to navigate it. All of this makes sense in a human-shaped robot."
Tesla Bot will use Tesla's full Tesla autonomous driving computer, autopilot cameras and the company's full suite of artificial intelligence tools: neural network planning, automatic object labeling, simulation capabilities and more.
It will be interesting to see if investors agree that this is the next logical step. Either way, it won't be long in coming. "The Tesla bot will be real," Musk said at the company's artificial intelligence event. "We think we'll probably have a prototype next year."