Робот Optimus / Tesla
The human body has evolved to adapt to other than warehouse or industrial work. The former head of the Optimus group at Tesla believes that non-humanoid robots are needed for these jobs.
Chris Walti, creator and ex-team leader of the development of the Tesla robot, said to Business Insider, that Optimus humanoid robots are not a good device for factory work. Although it is an exciting technology, such robots are inefficient in warehouses, logistics, and production.
«This is not a useful form factor. Most of the work that has to be done in industry — is highly repetitive, where speed is a key»,” the engineer said.
Walti worked at Tesla for seven years before leaving three years ago. He founded Mytra, a company that uses slab-shaped robots that can move in any direction to transport payloads between warehouses through giant, cage-like structures.
According to Walti, humanoid robots are an engineering challenge several orders of magnitude more difficult than self-driving cars because they are designed for a wider range of movements and tasks. He believes that robotics is not yet sufficiently advanced to deploy humanoid robots: «They are a ninth-inning robotics problem, and we are in the third inning».
«The human form evolved to avoid wolves and bears. We were not designed to perform repetitive tasks over and over again. So why do you take a suboptimal system that is not really designed to perform repetitive tasks and make it perform such tasks?».
Before starting Optimus, Chris Walti worked on automating the Tesla Model 3 production line. In 2021, he became a senior manager of the team that created the «bot Tesla», which was later named Optimus. Walti saw the robot as a side project and was very surprised when Elon Musk started talking about robots as the future of the company. Musk is extremely passionate about Optimus, talking a lot about their use in factories and Holds public demonstrations — on which, however, «robots» remotely controlled by humans.