Tesla (TSLA) has released a new video of its humanoid robot Optimus that shows its newly gained capability of catching balls.
This is an interesting development as it requires many upgrades to the hardware and the robot’s vision software to perform a complex maneuver like catching balls thrown at it.
The following video shows the Tesla Optimus robot with a new hand. The right hand is the old generation and the left hand that’s catching the balls is the new generation hand. “Got a new hand for Black Friday,” the official account of Tesla Optimus posted on X (Twitter).
“Let’s give Optimus a hand for catching ball!” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X commenting on the latest video of the robot catching tennis balls.
Tesla only upgraded the left hand of Optimus which is catching tennis balls being thrown his way. The left hand is the latest generation of the Optimus hand for the Gen 2 Optimus robot.
This new hand was put on display at the ‘We, Robot’ Robotaxi unveiling event on 10th October. But at the time, it was not installed on any of the Optimus robots present at the event. The latest generation hand was shown separately, demonstrating its motoring capabilities.
The previous version of the hand (right hand in the video) had a freedom of 11 degrees while the latest version has 22 degrees of freedom. This is why Optimus is able to catch oncoming balls mid air.
Tesla Optimus has one fair advantage compared to other humanoid robots currently on the market — the neural net-based Tesla Vision AI. This is the same neural net used by Tesla cars for its Autopilot Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature.
Tesla Vision allows Optimus to watch and identify objects in its surroundings freely and act accordingly. In another video released by Tesla last month, Optimus is seen walking around the Tesla factory, objects, workers, and finding the charge port autonomously.
Since Tesla neural nets get updated with large video and audio data sets every day, the vision AI of Optimus will gain incremental improvements with time. No robotics company other than Tesla has such a big LLM (large language model) data feed for its neural net machine learning — hence, the edge Tesla Optimus has over other humanoid robots.
Last year, Elon Musk said that Optimus will be able to thread a needle in a year’s time. It’s almost one year after this statement. However, instead of threading needles, we can see it catching balls with the new hand — still impressive progress, IMHO.
Optimus robot threading a needle is on Tesla’s list of tasks and we might see it soon — but probably early next year.
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