Tesla CEO Elon Musk and leaders from the company’s AI and hardware teams are expected to speak at the company’s AI Day 2022, an engineering recruiting event that will be streamed live on Friday starting around 5 p.m. on California. You can watch AI Day 2022 here.
During the last AI Day in August 2021, Musk said that Tesla will build a humanoid robot, which today is called either Tesla Bot or Optimus.
“It’s meant to be friendly, of course, and to navigate people’s worlds and eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks,” Musk said at the time.
Tesla didn’t have a hardware prototype to show last year and made the 2021 announcement with an actor dressed in a Tesla Bot suit dancing on stage. The stunt drew derision from critics and cheers from fans.
This year, investors are expecting a real technical demonstration of the robot, along with updates on Tesla’s progress in developing self-driving technology that could turn the company’s existing electric vehicles into robotics.
Musk has been promising a truly self-driving Tesla since 2016, when he said a coast-to-coast demonstration would happen by the end of 2017. To date, the company has only released driver assistance systems that must be constantly monitored by a human a driver who remains attentive to the road and his car, ready to take over at any time.
When Musk initially released the humanoid robot concept at AI Day 2021, Musk said of Optimus, “It should be able to, ‘please go to the store and get me the following groceries,’ that kind of thing.”
Musk later said that the robots made by Tesla would one day cost more than its cars, and that thousands of them would be put to work as moving parts around the factories where people build cars and batteries.
During Tesla’s Q4 2021 earnings call, Musk noted, “If you think about the economy — the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. So what happens if you don’t actually have a labor shortage? I’m not even sure what economics means at this point. That’s what Optimus is all about, so important.”
Tesla has had mixed results with automation.
As Bernstein senior analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in a Sept. 30 note ahead of AI Day 2022, in 2018 Tesla “mistakenly tried to hyper-automate its final assembly (ie putting parts into cars) “. The result was that Musk soon admitted that “the over-automation at Tesla was a mistake” and “people are undervalued.”
Tesla has since brought more people back to its production and assembly lines, but Sacconaghi writes that today Tesla is over-automating its customer service. Tesla owners typically find it difficult to contact individual sales and service representatives at Tesla and are directed to do all possible complaint resolution through the Tesla mobile app.
Longtime robotics engineer Alexander Kernbaum, who now serves as interim director of robotics at the vaunted nonprofit research and development organization SRI International, says that whether Tesla impresses with its AI Day robotics update or not, the company has the resources to develop something meaningful and inspire new interest in the field.
However, Kernbaum notes, when it comes to creating a robot that can make the difference in a car assembly plant, there’s really no need for Tesla to develop a two-pedal robot. “Mobile robots will find applications,” he explains, “but mobility needs to be as simple as possible for a factory environment, which means wheels will be the way to go, not legs.”
Robotic legs require a lot of power, for one thing, which would strain any battery Tesla develops for its robotics. Also, legged robots – like humans – can trip and fall. Wheeled robots won’t be as prone to tipping over. Concern for safety should be equal in a factory, Kernbaum suggests.
Kernbaum believes Tesla would be best off focusing on robotic arms. He said, “Hands are like the ultimate multi-tool. Dexterity and hand manipulation are the big 10-year challenges that will have an obvious impact on all of precision manufacturing and everything really.”
AI Day 2022 will be the company’s first major event since Tesla’s former AI chief Andrei Karpati resigned. The AI day comes ahead of Tesla’s third-quarter auto production and delivery report, which is expected within days.
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