Tesla was not the first company to begin working on a humanoid form factor, but while being the first to market does carry weight in this high-tech space, we’re at the very beginning of the humanoid robot story.
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Ahead of Tuesday’s earnings, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the carmaker will begin selling its Optimus humanoid robot in 2026. In fact, Optimus has already started performing tasks autonomously, like handling batteries, in one of Tesla’s facilities, according to its earnings report.
“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” the executive posted on X.
During Tuesday’s earnings call, Musk also estimated that the long-term demand for general purpose humanoid robots is “in excess of 20 billion units,” a number he got to by combining the 8 billion people on Earth who will apparently want one with the industrial use cases.
These dates, while broad, and those estimations should be taken with a grain of salt. Plenty can happen to the timeline between now and then, and if Optimus is indeed delayed, it would be far from the first time a Musk product suffered from a dynamic timeline. Very early on, Musk suggested that production on the humanoid could begin in 2023.
We do know that Tesla has funneled a ton of resources into the endeavor. As former Tesla Optimus lead Chris Walti recently told me, “And then Elon [Musk] was like, ‘We should build a humanoid. My team was tapped to lead that. I led the internal hiring effort for that team. Everything you saw on AI Day was a product of those efforts.” He added that “at some point, [Optimus] became the number one effort in the company.”
The market has also changed substantially since Optimus’ 2021 spandex unveiling. Some have even credited Tesla’s announcement with motivating some top competitors to disclose their own efforts earlier than they might have otherwise.
Broadly speaking, robotics benefited from the pandemic. Staffing shortages led to an influx in investments and a kind of renaissance in industrial automation. More recently, an explosion of interest in generative AI has further accelerated the industry and the push toward “general-purpose” robots.
As impressive as demos might be, however, there’s a lot of work standing between today’s systems and true general-purpose robots. The chasm between today’s ChatGPT offerings and synthetic systems that can operate and learn like people is much wider than it might initially appear.
It’s largely a software/AI issue, but there’s also plenty of work to be done to create mechatronic systems that can execute on these actions at scale. Increasingly, the industry is looking to the humanoid form factor to fill in that gap. We’ve designed the world for people, so why not design robots for that world?
Tesla was not the first company to begin working on a humanoid form factor — nor, according to available evidence, is it the furthest along. But while being the first to market does carry weight in this high-tech space, we’re at the very beginning of the humanoid robot story.
Some companies listed below won’t make it, and others we’ve never heard of may take their place. Here’s where things stand as of July 2024.
Image Credits: 1X
This Norwegian startup made a big splash in 2023 with a $23.5 million funding round. The list of investors was even more impressive than the dollar amount, with backing from Tiger Global and, notably, OpenAI. It represented an important vote of confidence from the GPT-maker and signaled its interest in a physical embodiment for its platforms.
Back in January, 1X announced a $100 million Series B and has more recently hired some big names from companies like BMW and Tesla. Recent videos have showcased its smiley-faced wheeled robot, Eve, responding to voice commands and performing household tasks like cleaning.
Notably, the company’s name is a reference to its commitment to demo its robots at 1X speed. Not labeling sped-up video is one of a number of tricks companies can use to make their projects seem further along than they actually are.
Image Credits: Agility Robotics
Agility was early to the game, and as a result, the company’s distinctive bipedal robot, Digit, has taken more steps down the road to commercialization than anyone in the space. Following pilots with a slew of different partners, including Amazon, the company announced in June that its humanoid was the first to move beyond the pilot phase.
Digit’s first real gig isn’t glamorous — though, to a certain extent, that’s kind of the whole point of this exercise. The robot has begun moving plastic totes around a Spanx factory in Georgia.
Image Credits: Apptronik/Mercedes
This Austin-based firm has been working on humanoids for some time now, courtesy of its Valkyrie partnership with NASA. In March, the company announced that it had begun warehouse pilots with Mercedes-Benz.
Image Credits: Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics is at once the OG and the new kid on the block. The original hydraulic Atlas dates back to 2013. It retired the system in April, only to debut an electric version a day later. The strength and flexibility of the system’s actuators caused plenty in the industry to sit up and listen.
Thus far, we’ve only seen a 40-second video of the robot in action. At the time, CEO Robert Playter told TechCrunch that its parent company, Hyundai, was planning to begin piloting the robot in factories at some point in 2025, with full-scale production still a few years out.
Image Credits: Figure
Back in February, Figure announced a massive $675 million raise from backers, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Nvidia and Intel Capital. The round valued the South Bay firm at $2.6 billion post-money. Earlier in the year, Figure announced that its 01 robot was set to be piloted at a BMW factory in South Carolina. A video of the robot in that setting debuted earlier this month.
Image Credits: Sanctuary AI
In April, Sanctuary AI announced that it was beginning pilots with automotive manufacturer Magna. Phoenix is Sanctuary AI’s first humanoid to walk on two legs. An earlier model had already been deployed to a retailer in its native Canada.
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