Some robot experts who watched saw a project that seemed to be getting underway quickly. “There’s nothing fundamentally groundbreaking, but they’re doing cool stuff,” said Stefanie Tellex, an assistant professor at Brown University.
Henrik Christensen, who researches robotics and AI at UC Davis, calls Tesla’s native hominid “a good first design,” but adds that the company has shown no evidence that it can perform basic navigation, grasping or manipulation. Jessy Grizzle, a professor at the University of Michigan robotics lab who works on robots with legs, said Tesla’s project, while still early, appeared to be making good progress. “It’s incredible to go from a man in a suit to real hardware in 13 months,” he says.
Grizzle says Tesla’s experience and expertise in car making in areas such as batteries and electric motors could help advance robotic hardware. Musk claimed at the event that the robot would eventually cost about $20,000 — an astonishing sum given the project’s ambition and significantly cheaper than any Tesla vehicle — but offered no timetable for its launch.
Musk was also vague about who his customers would be, or what use Tesla might find for a humanoid in its own operations. A robot capable of advanced manipulation might be important for manufacturing, taking over non-automated automotive parts, such as running wires through a dashboard or working carefully with flexible plastic parts.
In an industry where profits are thin and other companies offer electric vehicles that compete with Tesla’s, any manufacturing lead could be crucial. But companies have been trying to automate these tasks for years without much success. And a four-limbed design might not make much sense for such applications. Alexander Kernbaum, interim director of SRI Robotics, a research institute that previously developed a humanoid robot, says that robots only really feel like walking on legs in very complex environments. “A focus on legs is more of an indication that they want to capture people’s imaginations rather than solve real-world problems,” he says.
Grizzle and Christens both say they will watch future Tesla demonstrations for signs of progress, especially for evidence of the robot’s manipulation skills. Staying balanced on two legs while lifting and moving an object is natural for humans, but a challenge to engineer in machines. “If you don’t know the mass of an object, you need to stabilize your body plus everything you’re holding while carrying and moving it,” Grizzle says.
Wise will be watching too, and despite being unimpressed so far, hopes the project doesn’t fail as much as Google’s ill-fated robotics company that acquired Spree in 2013, sucking many researchers into projects that never saw the light of day. . The search giant’s splurge included two companies working on humanoids: Boston Dynamics, which sold it in 2017, and Schaft, which closed it in 2018. realize that robotics is difficult,” says Wise.
