Elon Musk reveals Tesla is building a humanoid robot
Elon Musk revealed on Thursday that Tesla is building a humanoid robot and aims to have a prototype ready by 2022.
During the company's AI Day, Musk said that the "Tesla Bot" is intended to be friendly and it will do tasks considered "boring, repetitive and dangerous." The Tesla CEO believes it will be able perform chores such as going to the store to fetch groceries or helping fix cars, but on a larger level, he predicts the creation will have "profound implications" for the economy.
"In the future, physical work will be a choice," he said. "If you want to do it, you can, but you won't need to do it."
He said their latest ambition is not far off from what the company does with their signature electric cars.
"If you think about what we're doing right now with the cars, Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company, because cars are like semi-sentiment, robots on wheels," he said.
The robot will stand around 5 feet 8 inches and have a screen with useful information, Musk said. He said it will have an autopilot system, eight cameras and run about 5 miles per hour, so users can "most likely overpower it."
"Hopefully that doesn't ever happen, but you never know," he joked.
The robot announcement comes amid a formal investigation by the U.S. government into Tesla's Autopilot partially automated driving system after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles. The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles, almost everything that Tesla has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year. Of the crashes identified by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as part of the probe, 17 people were injured and one was killed.