Elon Musk presented an impressive presentation of what Tesla is doing with AI and brought out a dancer in a spandex suit. Musk named the dancing bot, Tesla Bot. According to musk, the dancer in the suit is the model for a new humanoid robot Tesla is aiming to produce in the near future. Musk said Tesla Bot will stand five feet, eight inches (1.7m), and weigh 125 pounds (56kg). It will have “human-level hands,” and eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.”
Musk agreed that no company has been able to achieve a human replacement robot yet. He said “Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he said. “It kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form. We’re also quite good at sensors and batteries and actuators so we think we’ll probably have a prototype some time next year that basically looks like this.”
Now the question is whether you should believe Musk’s presentation or not because Tesla’s driver assist software is also unable to reliably avoid parked ambulances. As per Musk, soon, the machine would be able to follow human instructions intuitively, responding correctly to commands like “please go to a store and get me the following groceries.”
Carl Berry, a lecturer in robotics engineering at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire called it “horse shit”. Berry explained that deploying robotics and AI in manufacturing requires making the machine as simple as possible but here the Tesla CEO is more inclined towards increasing complexities.
He said, “I’m not saying Tesla researching this stuff isn’t a good thing but between them and companies like Boston Dynamics they leave the public with unrealistic expectations of what robotics is currently capable of or will be for many years.”
