(ETH) – After dominating the electric vehicle market and throwing his hat into the billionaire space race, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced the latest frontier he’s aiming to conquer: humanoid robots.
According to a report from France24, The irascible entrepreneur said Thursday he would have an initial prototype of an androgynous “Tesla Bot” by next year. Based on the same technology as the company’s semi-autonomous vehicles, the robot will be able to perform basic repetitive tasks with the aim of eliminating the need for people to handle dangerous or boring work, Musk said at an online event on Tesla’s advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he said. “It kind of makes sense to put that into a humanoid form.” Tesla’s touting of its automation technology comes as the carmaker faces increased scrutiny over its driver-assistance system, with safety regulators in the United States launching a probe after a series of crashes.
Tesla is accused of misleading motorists into believing the so-called Autopilot vehicles can drive themselves, though Musk has defended the system. According to electrek, It’s going to share a lot of the technology found in Tesla vehicles today, including the FSD computer that will receive data from a very similar suite of sensors.
Tesla released this slide regarding the AI hardware in the Tesla Bot: Using a similar suite of AI hardware will enable Tesla to leverage the development that it is already doing in the process of delivering a fully self-driving car. The main new sector of technology for Tesla is going to be the humanoid format, which Tesla released only a few details about:
TechCrunch reported: The bot is “intended to be friendly and navigate through a world built for humans,” he added. He also said they’re developing it so that humans can run away from it and overpower it easily. It’ll weigh 125 pounds and have a walking gait of 5 miles per hour, and its face will be a screen that displays important information.
Interestingly, Musk is imagining this as replacing much of the human drudge work that currently occupies so many people’s lives – not just labor but things like grocery shopping and other everyday tasks. He waxed about a future in which physical work would be a choice, with all the attendant implications that might mean for the economy.
