From our own James Vincent on Wednesday reporting on what experts will be looking for during the Tesla Bot reveal later today:
Anything where the hand just moves without contacting anything else is trivially simple and not impressive, no matter how ‘human-like’ it looks. If it simply waves hello, that’s a groan fail.
The Vergecast crew talks over their robot expectations for Elon Musk and Tesla’s AI day event on Friday.
On September 30th, Elon Musk will kick off Tesla’s AI Day to outline the company’s path to fully autonomous vehicles. But this year, Tesla’s cars are expected to take a backseat to a robot named Optimus.
Elon Musk’s company is getting ready to debut its supposedly not-fake humanoid robot, Optimus, during its “AI Day” event September 30th. What evidence do we have that it won’t just be another a person in a spandex robot costume doing an extremely awkward dance? There have been meetings! And job postings! And Elon tweeted that there may be a working prototype! Look, this will either be a major breakthrough in the field of robotics or a spectacular flop. But considering Musk has already solved the problem of self-driving cars, I’m inclined to— what’s that? [touches earpiece] I’m being told he hasn’t solved the problem of self-driving cars? And that humanoid robots could prove even more difficult? Oh well, then bring on the spandex dancers I guess.
Last-mile delivery robots are still trying to prove their worth, but here’s one apparent advantage: they can enter crime scenes. It’s a bit odd that the police didn’t stop the bot, especially as we don’t know whether a computer or human was driving.
A few months after announcing its next-gen robots, the company has purchased one of the companies that made some of its pallet-stacking machines.
This $1,550 robot can mop, vacuum, clean itself, and find you in your home
