Optimus to Ship in 2025
Tesla is aiming to ship a few of the new Optimus units in 2025, on the heels of a new promotional video of the robot folding clothes.
During Tesla’s Earnings call made on January 24th, a very optimistic new target for the potential production launch of Optimus, the Tesla Robot was mentioned by CEO Elon Musk. He said that he believes the company has a “good chance of shipping some number of Optimus units next year.”
However, it seems that even other Tesla executives are concerned with what Optimus is currently capable of in order for buyers to be interested in the product.
Another Tesla executive in the call commented that currently, the Bot is in testing, and there’s a barrier to get over in terms of getting Optimus to “actually do anything useful.” Which is fair enough - even Elon admitted that the robot cannot perform tasks such as folding the laundry autonomously - yet.
However Optimus has made giant strides forward in the tasks it is able to perform.
In such a short amount of time, - from September 2022 to December of last year, - the robot has made impressive strides forward in its speed, dexterity, and the complexity of tasks it is able to perform compared to the “Bumblebee” prototype. Being 10 kilograms lighter, the Gen 2 is also able to walk about 30 percent faster than the previous model.
In the December update of 2023, the engineering team showed Optimus was a learning system, utilising training from end-to-end neutral nets in order to gain new skills.
According to Milan Kovic, one of the lead lead engineers on the project, the robot will be able to eventually tackle “increasingly complex tasks,” - by collecting the data needed to train end-to-end neural nets so that it can begin doing those tasks autonomously, - as well as verifying if their current production models have the dexterity to be able to perform those tasks.
Part of that dexterity needed for smaller, more delicate tasks come from the new tactile sensors in the fingertips and better motor control with in-house actuators - both of which were showcased in the December update video that prompted Elon to predict that Optimus would be able to thread a needle by next year.
Aside from more domestic uses, Tesla is also hoping to leverage this increased performance into their car manufacturing line, where the Optimus would be utilised for dangerous or repetitive tasks on the line that would be difficult for a human.
Whether the Tesla Bot can manage to do enough of these tasks by next year or not is entirely up to the Optimus engineering team - and their ability to keep this pace until then.