Tesla confirms Optimus bots at Robotaxi event were human-assisted but walked and danced on their own

One of the chief Tesla engineers behind the Optimus robot project clarified the behavior of the so-called Tesla Bots during the Robotaxi unveiling event.

While Elon Musk teased that the Optimus robots will be walking around mingling with attendees, and even pouring them drinks at the bar during the afterparty, the more complex tasks were seemingly an illusion.

According to the Tesla Bot engineer Milan Kovac, the twenty or so Optimus units that Tesla had on display were walking and dancing on their own for four hours during the event. When it comes to more complex tasks, however, the robots didn't resort to some sort of mysterious artificial intelligence to gauge who ordered how many beers, but were rather "human-assisted," not that this comes as a big revelation.

We had about 20 active bots at all times - walking through a packed crowd, dancing, taking selfies, or even pouring drinks and handing out snacks. While of course they were human assisted to some extent to help showcase our vision of an amazing future, they walked, balanced and danced on their own for ~4 hours straight, with only one single fall (someone's handbag caught a bot's hand).

It was still a rather impressive showcase when taken in aggregate with all the other robo announcements like the Cybercab or the autonomous minibus.

The main point of having the Tesla Bot there was apparently to demonstrate the new degrees of freedom of the robotic hand that now went from 11 to 22, as this "considerably expands tactile sensing coverage." It was also a demonstration of the Tesla Bots' autonomy and balance.

Making nice demo videos is not easy, but ensuring a safe live operation of many humanoids for hours in a public outdoor environment imposed a much higher bar. Through this push, we made significant improvement across full-body controls & locomotion, hardware stability, and infrastructure.

Still, the Optimus bots that were seen pouring beer with fairly slow and deliberate movements, as well as chatting with attendees, were all assisted by human operators, indicating that Elon Musk's envisioned future of using an Optimus as personal butler at 30 grand apiece is pretty far away.

Kovac did hint at a significant leap in the Tesla Bot autonomy that the company has achieved, though, and teased that it will be shared with the general robot-loving public "soon."