On Thursday, Tesla announced a humanoid bot called Tesla bot to aid in laborious day-to-day tasks both at home and work. 

Elon Musk unveiled plans for Tesla bot during the Tesla AI day jokingly calling it “intended to be friendly.” But can a bot really be friendly?

Here’s what we know about the Tesla bot so far.

Tesla intends to build a humanoid bot that can easily navigate through the human world with a smile on its screen. It is proposed to be a non-automatic robotic use case to aid in technical work related to neural networks and Doja (the company’s advanced supercomputer). Musk claims that it would be a safe robot. 

During the announcement, Musk explained, “We should be worried about AI. What we’re trying to do here at Tesla is make useful AI that people love and is … unequivocally good.”

At 5’8, the bot is expected to weigh 125 pounds with the capacity to carry 45 pounds and will be able to walk up to 5 miles per hour. While it will look a lot like us with its proper humanoid body, it will not feature a face that we are made accustomed to through science fiction. Instead, it will have a screen that will display important information regarding a task.

During the presentation, Musk highlighted the intent behind the new bot saying, “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. 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.”

The engineering specifications of the bot outline 40 electrochemical actuators embedded across legs (12), hands (12), neck(12), and torso(2). The bot’s head will have 8 autopilot cameras that are similar to something already in use for Tesla cars. The cameras aid in sensing environments. Additionally, it will be powered by Tesla’s Full self-driving computer.

If everything goes right, the Tesla bot will eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks.” 

According to Musk, “In the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it, you can, but you won’t need to do it.”

The company intends to launch the prototype for the bot sometime next year. Watch the presentation below. 

While it’s exciting to see the future unveiling before us, it’s not the first time a car manufacturer has invested in bot technology. Honda’s Asimo Robot, Toyota Partner Robot, and GM’s Unimate have been around for a while. 

With Zuckerberg’s  Facebook Metaverse and Elon’s bot, we are headed towards the future we once knew in Asimov novels. How do you think the Tesla bot will change things? Do you think it would be as safe as Elon says it would be? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.