Elon’s Tesla robot is ‘fine’ at doing laundry in pre-scripted demo

Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla is doing more work – this time folding a T-shirt on a table in a development facility. The robot looks quite capable when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared some follow-up information, which certainly dampened the excitement over the robot’s homegrown accomplishment somewhat. Gives.

First of all, I can definitely fold shirts faster than him. Second, Optimus was not functioning autonomously, which is obviously the ultimate goal. Instead, the robot here is operating like a very expensive puppet, or a modern replica of an earlier rudimentary automaton, going through set motions to complete its task. Musk said that eventually, it “will definitely be able to do it completely autonomously”, however, and without the excessive artificial constraints for this demo, which included a fixed-height table and a carefully placed basket of clothes. Contains an article.

Tesla has put on a nice display of technical wizardry with recent highlight reels released by the company, but the likely scenario is that these are all highly scripted and pre-programmed activities that do more to show off the impressive functionality of the bot’s joints. Are. Servos and limbs compared to its artificial intelligence. Elon’s warning, when considered even for a second, is actually “all the much harder stuff will happen later.”

It would not be difficult to create a humanoid machine that could manipulate soft materials such as clothing to approximate human interaction with said objects; This could be some nice work by the animatronics. But to suggest that this puts them anywhere near the realm where Optimus would serve as a fully-functional household servant with all the capabilities of a human household worker would be like showing a video of a wooden puppet and saying ‘sure. It would be like adding ‘from’. He will soon be a real boy.’

Musk is famous for claiming that things are going to happen in a time frame that makes absolutely no sense, but his prediction of ‘within three to five years’ was made at the time of the bot prototype’s original unveiling last year ( Not counting the year before when this happened) is ridiculous given the current state of only a person wearing a suit) and the current state of the art of robotics in general.

TL;DR – Don’t start rescheduling your laundry folding schedule just yet.