Tesla Bot: Elon Musk unveils ‘friendly’ humanoid robot

Tesla on Thursday unveiled a humanoid robot that runs on the same AI used by the company’s autonomous vehicles. Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed details about Tesla Bot at the end of Tesla’s AI Day presentation and said a prototype is expected to be launched next year. Weighing in at 125 pounds, the 5-foot-8 robot will be built from “lightweight materials,” he said. It will come equipped with autopilot cameras that Tesla vehicles use to sense the environment and a screen to display information. The internal operations will be handled by Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer.

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Musk assured the Tesla Bot is “intended to be friendly” and “navigate through a world built for humans.”

Tesla Bot can move around at speeds up to 5mph, giving humans a chance to both outrun and “overpower” it.

He said the robot would “eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks” with “profound implications for the economy.”

“Basically, if you think about what we’re doing right now with cars, Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said.

“With the Full Self-Driving computer, [ … ] which will keep evolving, and Dojo and all the neural nets recognizing the world, understanding how to navigate through the world, it kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form.”

“What we’re trying to do here at Tesla is make useful AI that people love and is… unequivocally good,” he said during a question and answer session after the presentation. ” We should be worried about AI,” he said, reiterating past concerns about AI being the “biggest risk we face as a civilization.”

Tesla director Ganesh Venkataramanan said Project Dojo came into being after Musk asked Tesla engineers “to design a superfast training computer” a few years ago.

Tesla also unveiled in-house chips designed for its supercomputer Dojo to train its automated driving system.