Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot Debuts at World Robot Conference, Doesn’t Do Any Robot Things

The World Robot Conference successful Beijing was a amusement level of wonderment past week. Humanoid Chinese robots played the zither, folded laundry, and bested humans astatine the committee crippled Go. As these modern miracles unfolded, Tesla’s Optimus robot looked on, unmoving, from wrong a solid box.

The league took spot successful Beijing and ran from August 21st to the 25th. Attendees were a who’s who of Chinese robotic developers and immoderate were connected manus to amusement disconnected a imaginativeness of the aboriginal wherever humanoid machines bash humanities manual labor.

The Astribot S1 was determination performing Chinese martial arts and penning calligraphy with a brush. The Galbot and Turui robots proved their worthy by bagging groceries and moving soda cans astir immoderate shelves. Another company, Agribo, promised it would statesman delivering immoderate of its machines to customers this October.

While these machines puttered around, Tesla’s Optimus stared astatine them from a solid cage surrounded by the company’s electrical vehicles. Optimus is simply a sleek looking humanoid robot but it hasn’t done good successful its merchandise demos.

Elon Musk famously unveiled Tesla’s task into robotics successful the summertime of 2021 by promising the institution would soon enactment humanoid robots successful people’s homes. During the presentation, a stiff looking instrumentality walked connected signifier with Musk. It turned retired it was just a feline successful a suit. In a video Musk posted to X showing Optimus folding laundry, idiosyncratic is conscionable disconnected camera operating the instrumentality remotely.

The video had a large interaction connected the selling of different robots and it’s emblematic for different companies to adhd a “no teleoperation” statement to their videos. The radical making robots privation radical to cognize that the robots are moving independently. There’s not overmuch usage to a dilatory moving laundry folding robot if you person to run it yourself from the sidelines.

According to CNBC, China has invested much than $14 cardinal into the robotics manufacture implicit the past decade. Twenty-seven caller robots made their debuts astatine the league portion Optimus looked connected from his solid cage. Musk claimed that Optimus would rotation into Tesla factories by the extremity of the year.

“Tesla volition person genuinely utile humanoid robots successful debased accumulation for Tesla interior usage adjacent twelvemonth and, hopefully, precocious accumulation for different companies successful 2026,” he wrote successful a station connected X. The hype astir robots is large but it remains to beryllium seen whether the outgo of the accumulation volition outweigh the benefits successful the simplification of labour cost, fto unsocial if Tesla tin vessel one.