Tesla’s Optimus Bot is now capable of a new and very useful task, as a new video from CEO Elon Musk shows: doing your laundry.
Optimus is Tesla’s robot that it first unveiled a few years ago. In December, Tesla showcased the Gen 2 Optimus, which was capable of new tasks and talents and was incredibly impressive, considering the progress the company had made since the initial unveiling in 2021.
Tesla flexes Optimus as a “general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring,” and the showing off of its newest task is surely an encapsulation of that. Laundry is (arguably) one of the most monotonous, boring, and repetitive tasks that we have to perform.
However, it looks like Optimus will be able to help with that:
Optimus folds a shirt pic.twitter.com/3F5o3jVLq1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2024
Musk said in a subsequent communication on X that Optimus is not yet capable of performing t-shirt folding autonomously:
“Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won’t require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt).”
Tesla obviously has very ambitious targets for Optimus. Judging comments from Musk last month, the company expects it to be able to do things like thread a needle by the end of 2024, which would be a monumentally impressive task considering that it is difficult for some humans.
With the progress Tesla has made with Optimus, it will definitely be interesting to see what its capabilities will be within a year. However, what we’ve seen so far from its progress is already an indication that things are moving along at a pretty impressive rate.
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