Tesla is hiring people to do the robot

Tesla is employing radical to assistance bid its humanoid Optimus robot by wearing motion-capture suits and mimicking actions that it volition beryllium expected to perform. The position, advertised arsenic a “Data Collection Operator” connected Tesla’s vocation site, pays up to $48 per hr and requires walking for implicit 7 hours a time portion carrying up to 30 pounds, and wearing a VR headset for “extended periods of time.”

Employees indispensable besides beryllium betwixt 5’7’’ and 5’11’’ gangly — apt to beryllium successful a akin scope to Optimus’ projected 5’8’’ height. The authoritative X relationship for Tesla Optimus has previously teased what the relation entails, and Business Insider reports that Tesla has hired implicit 50 workers for the presumption implicit the past year.

Motion seizure is a communal and typically cost-effective way to bid robots however to execute human-like movements, but Tesla is 1 of the archetypal to bash truthful astatine this scale. While immoderate online videos person shown Optimus performing assorted tasks, Animesh Garg, a elder researcher astatine Nvidia Research, told Business Insider that Optimus whitethorn necessitate millions of hours of information earlier it’s afloat acceptable to enactment successful Tesla’s factories.

“The magnitude of information postulation you’d request would easy beryllium fractional a cardinal dollars and the existent question is ‘Even if you bash that, bash you succeed?’ Because determination is nary warrant of success,” Garg said.

That’s beauteous emblematic for humanoid robots and the artificial quality systems moving them, which each necessitate an arduous magnitude of training. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised to person “genuinely useful” bots successful accumulation adjacent year (a timeline helium himself has admitted is mostly guesswork), Optimus presently doesn’t look immoderate person to completion than the rival offerings from Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Apptronik being tested by different conveyance manufacturers.