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Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

electrek.co

211–220 of 416 posts

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#211

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

Have you even watched the announcement? Has anyone commenting here did? He clearly said the bot v1 won't do more than carrying simple things and will be super slow and weak. It will only have very basic grasping hands, even likely with 3 fingers. It will be what grasshopper was to Falcon 9. And about autonomous driving, Tesla autopilot seems to be almost as good as Waymo, except with pure vision. And I'd bet a great…

which, anyone naysaying bot v1 doesn't see it. Think about moving a dishwasher. Up and down stairs, over and across pathways which are just a little too narrow for the furniture dolly so it keeps riding into the dirt. The target market for v1 is going to be slim, because I bet it won't be cheap. But it will be endlessly useful, and doesn't need to solve really hard general AI grade robotics problems, just some computer vision things, and without the self-driving car crashing penalty.

The question is: how much? Price it too high and the market just isn't there. Furniture dolly's don't have the same cachet as sports cars. I'm hopeful, because the technology is so close.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#212
post #66

It is interesting that many of the top comments are as dismissive as: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame,” When you look at Tesla’s talent in: AI + motors + batteries + manufacturing I can’t believe how negative and dismissive the comments are. Can we not have some appreciation for what Tesla HAS achieved vs only focusing on missed ship dates? The part that I think is going over peoples head is that for so m…

Im 100% sure Tesla can mass-produce the hardware for such robots. But the biggest challenge is in software, And then the FSD debacle comes to mind.

There's major advances in AI needed to get to full self driving and even more advances for a useful autonomous humanoid robot.

But then again, those will not come to fruition just by waiting, someone has to work on this and if Tesla advances the state of the art, I can only welcome them. But I don't expect a Tesla bot in the way Elon poses here in the foreseeable future.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are. At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. I feel this…

Converting supermarkets to dark stores. Supermarket by day, robot driven fulfillment centre by night. Using humaoids to pushing and fetching items from a human-centric store.

I've been wrong many times before but still have trouble believing this would be more efficient than just having two separate buildings. Even in places where land is very expensive.

How many dark stores would you have to run in a city like Boston to get the same efficiency you could get from a signle warehouse with a similar system to this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

And if you insist on doing that multi-use concept - it still seems like a robot on wheels and with much different than human arms would be more efficient.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#214

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

Tesla FSD might end up getting good enough after a hardware upgrade in 5 years or so. The humanoid seems at least a decade or two away.

That said, I truly enjoy that he's investing time and money in these futuristic sci-fi projects rather than trying to optimize the next quarter earnings.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#215

At this stage electrek is nothing more than a glorified Tesla fan site. Tesla would announce a new genetically engineered, AI-powered cow breed, and Fred Lambert would find a way to have it all make sense.

Hard not to when you virtually own $500K in Tesla supercars provided Tesla doesnt go out of business before releasing them. https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#216

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

If he surrounds himself with the right people and sticks to his spacex production rules:

Step 1 Make it less dumb

Step 2 Delete a part of the process - If you're not adding step in 10% of the time, you're not deleting enough

Step 3 Simplify or Optimize

Step 4 Go Faster

Step 5 Automate

He may very well excel yet again...

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#218

If Musk was really serious about this, he would start with smaller steps: 0) Finish the tentacle charging robot they demoed in 2015 (roll out to superchargers) 1) Build delivery robot on wheels using FSD (like the Starship Technology's robots). These could be used on hospitals, possibly warehouses, pizza delivery, cleaning streets, painting lanes on roads, ... 2) Build dog-like robot, like Boston Dynamics's spot with…

Flipped around, but potentially the same takeaways:

Turns out building a true FSD car is almost as hard as a humanoid robot. They've already got a Boston Dynamic's-like robot dog internally, but it sucks at getting around a parking lot.

i.e. set your expectations of the arrival of true FSD on the car to whenever you think Tesla can actually deliver this robot.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting…

> If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to inv…

Musk isn’t actually looking for profitable products. He’s trying to be the king of vaporware. Remember the Cybertruck? Or how he said he could control pigs by putting microchips in their brains? Or how Tesla was all in on Bitcoin until it wasn’t?

He probably doesn’t even do it to bump the stock price. It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while. Then they both smoke so much weed they forget the previous never-gonna-happen idea and come up with a brand new one.

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