Tesla Has Constructed Solely “5 Or 6” Optimus Robots So Far, Musk Reveals

Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotic was first introduced by the EV maker on the AI Day occasion in August 2021, which suggests it should quickly be two years previous.

So when will it’s available for purchase? Properly, it is nonetheless too quickly to speak about that, as growth of the robotic remains to be within the early levels. The Tesla Bot was proven in a video in Could strolling and selecting up stuff, and that was just about every thing it was in a position to do on the time.

On Tesla’s Q2 2023 earnings name yesterday, a retail investor requested for an replace on the progress of the robotic’s capabilities and requested data on what number of Optimus robots the corporate has made to date.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk joked that 10 million Optimus robots have been lively earlier than revealing the far much less spectacular actuality. “I feel we’re round 5 or 6 bots… But it surely’s kind of – sure, there’s extra each month. There’s a variety of attention-grabbing issues concerning the Optimus bot,” Musk mentioned, in accordance with Searching for Alpha (by way of Teslarati).

He famous that Tesla has constructed a small variety of robots to date principally as a result of the corporate has actuator provide points. Extra particularly, Tesla realized that there have been no off-the-shelf actuators that “labored nicely” for Optimus.

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Consequently, Tesla needed to design and construct the actuators itself. The actuator is a key part for robots because it creates movement by changing saved power into mechanical work. 

“So, we have truly needed to design our personal actuators that combine the motor or the facility electronics, the controller, the sensors. And actually, each one in every of them is customized. After which, in fact, we’ll be utilizing the identical inference {hardware} because the automobile,” Elon Musk defined. He added that Tesla is designing these actuators for quantity manufacturing. 

“So, they don’t seem to be simply lighter, tighter, and extra succesful than another actuators wherever that exists on this planet, but it surely’s additionally truly manufacturable. So, we should always be capable of make them in quantity.”

Tesla’s head honcho mentioned the primary “kind of manufacturing candidate actuators built-in and strolling needs to be round November-ish,” with a manufacturing ramp to comply with shortly after that. 

Musk mentioned in Could that Optimus was “extraordinarily underrated” and had big potential for the corporate. He mentioned it might not be shocking if Tesla’s enterprise sooner or later is constructed on the again of its humanoid robotic, for which he predicted demand as excessive as 10 to twenty billion models.

Consequently, the robotic would far outnumber Tesla’s world car fleet, with which it shares the Full Self-Driving software program.