Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, announced on Thursday that the company will build a humanoid robot named Tesla Bot.
“We’re also fantastic at sensors and batteries, and we’ll probably have a prototype that looks like this next year,” Musk remarked, just after an actor dressed as the Tesla robot gyrated wildly on stage. The actor was not a genuine robot, he said, but “the Tesla Bot will be real.”
The announcement came as part of Tesla’s AI Day, a series of tech presentations in California aimed at attracting machine learning expertise.
The Tesla Bot is an example of Musk’s showmanship, in which he reveals that Tesla is working on interesting goods that will be released years in the future in order to stimulate backers such as employees, customers, and investors. Those announcements frequently do not occur according to the schedule.
For example, Musk stated in April 2019 during a “Autonomy Day” event that Tesla would have 1 million autonomous “robotaxis” on the road by 2020. The robotaxis have vanished. Musk presented a demonstration of his Solar Roof product on the back lot of Universal Studios in Los Angeles in October 2016. The solar roof tiles on show were only intended to be used as a demonstration.