is 1.72 meters high and weighs 56.6 kilograms. It can take about 20 kilograms of items, and its walking speed is 5 miles per hour (about 8 kilometers per hour)... On October 1, Beijing time, Musk greeted the world with the prototype of the first humanoid robot "Optimus" of Tesla .
"Just like the birth of autonomous driving has increased transportation productivity by an order of magnitude, Optimus Prime may be able to increase economic benefits by an order of magnitude." Musk declared, "This will represent a fundamental transformation of human civilization."
With the development of related industries such as materials science, sensors, and chips, the field of artificial intelligence has ushered in a carrier that is more in line with humans - humanoid robots. From Atlashml2 of Boston Dynamics, to Ameca of British robot company Engineered Arts, to Walker of UBL Technology and Xiaomi’s “Iron Big”, more and more technology companies are engaged in the research and development of humanoid robots. Is humanoid robot the ultimate form of artificial intelligence? How far can we do humanoid robots?
Different versions of "Optimus Prime" Picture According to Tesla 2022 AI Day event live broadcast
Robots that subvert the industry have not yet appeared
The industry believes that the development history of humanoid robots is mainly divided into three stages. The first stage is the early development stage represented by Waseda University humanoid robot; the second stage is the highly integrated development stage represented by Honda humanoid robot; the third stage is the highly dynamic movement development stage represented by Boston Dynamic humanoid robot.
Boston Dynamics launched the human-shaped robot Atlas in 2013, is the "cultivator" of hydraulic drive, and the motion control has outstanding capabilities. After years of iteration and upgrading, many complex actions such as long jump , inverted handstand, front roll , etc. can be realized.
The robots of British robot company Engineered Arts attach great importance to "face". The biggest highlight of Ameca, which will be released at the end of 2021, is that it can make a variety of human facial expressions and express various human emotions in combination with body language. As of 2022, Ameca's face has 34 moving parts, which can make detailed facial expressions such as joy, surprise, anger, confusion, and sadness.
Humanoid robot Ameca makes confusing expressions. According to the official video of Engineered Art
On August 11, 2022, Lei Jun showed the first full-size humanoid bionic robot CyberOne (also known as "Iron Big") in its third annual speech. It can grasp objects weighing 3 kilograms vertically with one hand, and identify six categories, a total of 45 human emotional voices and 85 environmental sounds. "Tieda" walked onto the stage and gave Lei Jun a rose.
Lei Jun and "Tieda" are on the same stage. According to Xiaomi's
, what is the "Optimus Prime" released by Tesla today? Tianmu News reporter saw that it appeared and waved and did simple dance moves. Musk said this is the first time Optimus Prime has walked off the leash. "It can actually do much more than we show, we just don't want it to fall."
"Musk introduced that this robot is priced at 20,000 US dollars, and I think the cost may be more than this number." Zhang Xiang, director of the Institute of New Energy Vehicle Technology, Jiangxi New Energy Technology Vocational College, said in an interview with Tianmu News that Tesla's humanoid robot looks relatively single from the live broadcast, and the fineness of the hands needs to be improved. Zhang Xiang said, "If it is just a move to move boxes and watering flowers as demonstrated in the video, it may not be enough to hit consumers' desire to buy."
In fact, whether a robot needs to be made into a human form is itself a controversial topic. Zhang Xiang believes that Tesla's exhibition of humanoid robot prototypes rather than mature commercial products may be more of a more attractive capital attention and demonstrate its achievements in technological innovation.
As early as last year's AI Day, Tesla had released the concept videos and pictures of "Optimus Prime". The domestic A-share robot concept stock rose sharply. Now released will inevitably cause another hustle and bustle in the capital market.
commercialization is still far away
Humanoid robots need to be truly implemented, and they cannot rely solely on concept building and capital pursuit. Technology, capital and market are undoubtedly not the hurdles that are swaying in front of enterprises.
The most important difficulty is technical difficulties. During the research and development of autonomous vehicles, Tesla has a large number of human-computer interaction, environmental perception and engineering machinery technologies that can be reused on robots.
According to Tesla R&D personnel, the head of "Optimus Prime" is equipped with the same camera and other sensor array as Tesla car . The computing power support is provided by the autonomous driving chip, sharing the AI system with the car, and using the training mechanism of the Dojo supercomputer to improve the functions of the robot. If enterprises without technology accumulation rashly enter the market, they will inevitably face the early technical difficulties, "a skillful woman cannot cook without rice."
The second difficulty is the difficulty of implementing it. Humanoid robots are not like new energy vehicles, and there is no humanoid robot that can truly enter smart factories and thousands of households for reference. Even though the robot giant Boston Dynamics Atlas has not yet been commercialized for many years, the unit price of $2 million is enough to discourage a large number of people.
The third difficulty is the difficulty of investment. Humanoid robots are a complex technology that requires long-term investment, which tests corporate capital accumulation and acquisition of external investment is not easy. According to Minsheng Securities , the market size of humanoid robots will reach 63 billion yuan in 2025 and 372 billion yuan in 2030. In 2021, there were 238 investment and financing incidents in my country's robot industry. Industrial robots are still the category with the highest financing proportion, and the service-type humanoid robot track does not attract much capital.
However, humanoid robots are still a blue ocean at present. Taking industrial robots as an example, the core components mainly include reducers (35% of the cost), servo systems (20% to 25% of the cost), controllers, etc. Industrial robots have only 6 joints, while humanoid robots have at least 40 joints. In this way, the demand for related core components will increase significantly in the future, bringing a capacity gap, and domestic component manufacturers will also usher in opportunities.
At present, Tesla has made an ambitious plan to deploy thousands of "Optimus Prime" humanoid robots at the Texas factory, and plans to deploy robots to Tesla factories around the world in the future, with a scale of millions. Musk said that over time, the importance of humanoid robots may even surpass that of the automotive business.
