Elon Musk introduced two versions of his home robot, called Optimus: one that could walk and one (pictured) that has the design aesthetic that will ultimately be used. (Source: YouTube video by CNET)

Musk Introduces More Advanced Version of Optimus Robot Prototype at Event

The assignment editor gave two gizmodo.com writers the task of covering Elon Musk’s AI Day. It was known to be the day Mr. Musk would reveal the new humanoid robot he is calling Optimus. Neither writer was very impressed. In fact, one writer, Lucas Ropek said this about the experience:

Is it there yet? No. Definitely not. But, you know, it’s also not quite the total joke that some of us may have been expecting.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO said Optimus could do a lot more than what was visible during the company’s presentation—which, admittedly, wasn’t much.

“The robot can actually do a lot more than we just showed you,” Musk quipped. “We just didn’t want it to fall on its face.”

You might recall the last time Musk did the robot reveal, he had an actual human in a robot suit. Major fail that day. The rest of the night was taken up by presentations given by Tesla engineers, who explained much of the science behind the robot.

When Tesla first announced plans for Optimus at last year’s AI Day, Musk infamously forced some unfortunate soul to don an ugly spandex suit and trot around onstage to demonstrate what the bot would eventually look like. “The Tesla bot will be real,” he claimed, as people laughed at him. Since then, Musk has made a lot of wild allegations about what this contraption will look like and how it will function: It will stand 5 feet 8 inches tall! It will totally re-structure the nature of labor in society! It will mow your lawn for you! The video below will show you what the reporters saw.

All of this obviously inspires a lot of questions: For one thing, how long until it, like, works? Also, does anybody want to hazard a guess as to how much worse of a robot Optimus is next to Xiaomi’s CyberOne? We would ask Tesla but the company dissolved its PR office two years ago. We have a feeling we’ll learn more soon enough, though. In fact, it’s a guarantee we’ll get some relevant Elon tweets before too long.

The other writer decided to share a 40-year walk down failed robots lane by showing previous attempts to bring robots into our lives. But it seems writer Andrew Liszewski may have unlocked a secret when he wrote:

Unless they’re cleaning floors, robots have always been a hard sell to consumers.

For now, the floor cleaning robot is by far the most used and most effective robot in many people’s houses.

Liszewski’s piece has 16 video examples of failed robots and they are quite entertaining.

read more at  gizmodo.com

you might also like this story on the history of robots on gizmodo.com