Optimus Robot is coming to Tesla’s AI Day 2 – but it will have to do more than dance to silence critics

Tesla is holding its AI Day 2 on September 30, and in the run-up, Elon Musk has prioritized both Optimus and an updated smart call feature. According to the tech billionaire, both projects have a deadline at the end of the month.

During Tesla’s first AI day, it announced a number of projects including the Tesla Bot, also known as Optimus. At the time, the most tangible thing the company could produce was a dancing person dressed as a robot. On September 30, Musk will have to appear with a lot more if he wants to silence critics.

Nancy Cooke, a professor of human systems engineering at Arizona State University, told Reuters that Tesla will have to show the robot that it performs unscripted actions, not just simple tricks. “If he just lets the robot walk around, or he makes the robots dance, that’s already happened. That’s not very impressive,” she says.

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Note, the Autopilot/AI team is also working on Optimus and (actually smart) summon/autopark, which have deadlines at the end of the month

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2022

Optimus is primarily intended as a robot that can stand in for people who do repetitive or dangerous work. One of the biggest challenges such robots face is when something unexpected happens. Adapting to that change in circumstances, sometimes no matter how small, can be too much for some robots to overcome. Musk is also well aware of the challenges.

In 2018, he specifically mentioned a challenge the Tesla team faced during production because of a robot that couldn’t handle picking up bits of “fluff” and putting them on batteries. Unlike a rigid part, the fluff presented an unpredictable challenge and the robot struggled with it.

Critics have noted that Musk and Tesla are pursuing the very difficult challenge of bringing an artificially intelligent humanoid robot to market, despite Full Self-Driving still not achieving its original goals. In 2019, Musk said there would be more than 1 million Tesla robot axes on the road by now. Not only has that not happened, but it doesn’t seem very close. Anyway, we’re excited to learn more at Tesla AI Day 2 on September 30.