Tesla Optimus prototype (2022 AI Day)

What it is

Optimus is Tesla's humanoid robot. The first prototype was presented without external support at Tesla's second AI Day in September 2022 ^[1]. "Humanoid" here means a machine built to roughly human proportions, with two arms, two legs and a head, rather than a wheeled base or a single arm fixed to a bench.

How it got there

Before there was a machine that moved, there was a display version: it appeared at the Cyber Rodeo event held at Tesla's Giga Texas site on 7 April 2022 ^[2]. That one was made for looking at. The September 2022 AI Day is where the robot was shown in motion. Wikipedia's account describes semi-functional prototypes at that event: one was able to walk on stage, and a sleeker one was able to move its arms ^[2]. So the debut involved more than one machine and more than one level of finish — one unit demonstrating walking, another demonstrating arm movement inside a tidier body.

The specification in the report

A report on the prototype gives a 2.3 kWh battery pack, a height of about 172 cm and a weight of 73 kg ^[1]. It also gives energy use of 100 W while sitting and 500 W while walking slowly ^[1].

Battery and power figures are the practical core of a humanoid robot. Unlike an industrial arm bolted to a production line, it has to carry its own energy supply, and every watt spent on walking and balancing is a watt not spent on work.

The same report counts more than 200 degrees of freedom overall, with 27 of them in the biomimetic fingers ^[1]. A degree of freedom is one independent direction in which a joint can move — bending, or twisting about a single axis. A body with more than 200 of them can take an enormous number of postures, and controlling all of that becomes correspondingly harder. The fingers alone account for 27, and hands are where fine manipulation is concentrated; "biomimetic" here means modelled on the human hand.

Videos, and what critics said

In September 2023 Tesla released a video in which Optimus sorted coloured blocks by colour, located its limbs in space and held a yoga pose ^[2]. Locating its limbs in space is proprioception — knowing where the parts of your own body are without looking. Wikipedia also records that critics said some tasks in Tesla's promotional videos required teleoperation ^[2]. Teleoperation means a person is controlling the robot remotely, so part of what such a video shows is the skill of the operator.

Where it sits

This machine was Optimus's first public appearance: a humanoid prototype that walked and moved its arms on a stage. Judging machines of this kind means keeping three questions apart — what the hardware can do, what the software can do on its own, and whether a person is working behind the scenes. The 2022 prototype supplied numbers for the first. The 2023 video was offered as evidence for the second, and critics raised the third.