Optimus

Optimus is the humanoid robot program Tesla first announced at AI Day in August 2021 (the Tesla Bot concept). On September 30, 2022 (October 1 Beijing time), at the second AI Day, the first prototype capable of walking independently — codenamed Bumblebee — made its official debut: about 1.72–1.73 m tall, 73 kg, with 28 actuators across the body (6 designs, 3 rotary and 3 linear), 11 degrees of freedom per hand, a 2.3 kWh battery and the FSD pure-vision compute approach. On stage the prototype waved and walked slowly.

The concept specifications announced in 2021 were: 5 ft 8 in (about 173 cm) tall, 57 kg, a 45 lb (about 20 kg) payload, a top speed of 5 mph (about 8 km/h) and 40 actuators across the body. The actual prototype weighed 73 kg (over the concept target), and media measurements put its carrying capacity at about 10 kg.

Optimus's technical approach centers on transferring Tesla's FSD vision neural network and Dojo supercomputer training stack from autonomous driving to a humanoid robot: camera input and end-to-end neural network output of control signals, without relying on high-definition maps or LiDAR. Musk has claimed a mass-production target price below US$20,000 and said the humanoid robot business will matter more than the car business. An updated version in March 2023 achieved upright walking and grasping, and was later superseded by Gen 2, released in December 2023.