Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.

Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.

I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.

They moved so smoothly, I was impressed

I heard the initial walk out was fully automated.

But the problem is the majority of people buying and hyping TSLA are not working or have close experience with robotics to see what’s real vs human controlled. That’s intentionally deceptive.

Where did you hear that?

I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?

In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc. So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.

The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.

Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.

The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .

> That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.

Yup. Exactly. The term for this is "Telechir":

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-93104-8_...

My kids have been around lots of robots of all kinds. The very first comment they made while watching the event was: "The robots are being remotely operated. There's no way that's autonomous."

Nice looking machines. Far from being practical outside of a highly controlled environment. This does feel like progress though.

> these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones)

Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial.

Add to that gearing, couplings, driver electronics, encoders, thermal management, calibration, noise, maintenance and other per-actuator requirements and the picture quickly becomes overwhelming.

This is an area that is still looking for a significant breakthrough.

We need better electroactive polymers.

The big breakthroughs have already happened.

- Small, powerful 3-phase servomotors are cheap and easy to obtain. Mass production of drone motors has advanced small motor technology considerably. Tiny motors use to be either toy-grade junk or expensive Swiss precision. That's improved.

- Motors with built-in encoders are, at last, available. Encoders used to be fragile plastic boxes stuck on the end of the motor. Also, thermal sensing inside the motor is common, so you can tell if you're overheating it.

- Permanent magnets are small and powerful, and have such high coercitivity that you don't have to worry about demagnetizing them if you over-drive the motor. The main limit on motor power is cooling. You can way overdrive a motor momentarily, like muscles.

- Motor controllers are now small and cheap, They cost about $1000 per motor two decades ago. The power semiconductors are small. Controllers can be programmed to use very high power levels briefly, monitoring thermal sensors.

It would be nice to have good linear actuators. Linear motors do exist, but never really became a big thing.

Ever the speech was just a guy trying to pretend he was a robot.

I'm totally with you on the evolution of motor tech because of drone and also personal mobility (scooters and hoverboard motors are a steal for what they can handle).

While high torque motors got way cheaper, especially with MIT Cheetah "clones" getting easily available, they're still at least 200-500 a pop (depending on the torque needed for each articulation) from what I could find.

I might not know where to search for the real gems though. Where do you search for cheap powerful servomotors?

While I didn't hear anything, I think the walk control would have to be local circuitry. I can't see how a remote operator could sense balance and do all the leg movements.

You can see a Tesla upper body controller here. Not sure if it's what they used for the event, but probably something like that. https://x.com/TroyTeslike/status/1845047695284613344

It's impressive how well the hardware seems to work now, though the software is still clunky. You can see how well the hardware works under human nervous control in the recent MIT bionic foot https://youtu.be/1tD7qd68i3o?t=36

(from https://spectrum.ieee.org/prosthetic-leg)

I suspect that the upper body is teleoperated, while the locomotion system is self-balancing and driven around with a joystick.

Reaction of the stock market to Tesla's "demo" was very negative. TSLA stock dropped about 10% immediately after the demo and has been flat since.[1]

[1] https://www.bing.com/search?&q=TSLA+stock

Well, maybe they shouldn't buy the stock of the company they don't understand? Or at least check experts' opinion beforehand? This sounds like an obvious hint in case of pharma or defense industry, why automotive should be different?