Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the humanoid robot is still in the lab stage but could be available for sale by the end of next year.
Some companies are betting on humanoid robots to fill potential labor shortages and perform repetitive tasks that can be dangerous or tedious in industries such as logistics, warehousing, retail and manufacturing.
Musk told investors in a conference call that he expected Tesla’s robot, to be named Optimus Prime, to be able to perform tasks at the factory by the end of this year.
Japan’s Honda and Hyundai Motor Co’s Boston Dynamics have been developing humanoid robots for years.
This year, Microsoft and Nvidia-backed startup Figure said it had signed a partnership with German automaker BMW to deploy humanoid robots in the automaker’s US factories.
Billionaire Musk has previously said that selling robots could become a bigger part of Tesla’s business than other areas such as car manufacturing.
“I think Tesla is in the best position of any humanoid robot maker to be able to mass produce intelligent reasoning about robots,” Musk said of artificial intelligence capabilities during a conference call Tuesday.
Musk has a history of failing to deliver on bold promises on Wall Street. In 2019, he told investors that Tesla would operate a network of “robotaxis” self-driving cars by 2020.
Tesla launched the first-generation Optimus robot named Bumblebee in September 2022. This year, the company released a video of a second-generation bipedal robot folding T-shirts in a company factory.
Image released a video in February of its 01 robot making coffee, while Boston Dynamics last week unveiled a motorized platform for its Atlas humanoid robot, which can be seen bending and turning from lying down to standing and walking.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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