While Chinese companies last week showed off human-like robots playing the zither or grabbing sodas, Tesla displayed its Optimus humanoid inside a clear box.
Humanoid? The requirements were clear... maximize the number of guns. How many guns are required to pick apples from a tree? Well if you got 10 apples, surely 10 guns right?
The idea is that there is untold trillions worth of existing infrastructure and tools that are designed to be operated by humanoids, so the hope is that by designing it close to a human form it will be able to perform task in an environment designed for human without having to design a different robot for each task.
Basically the idea is to create a robot that is good enough at doing a lot of things instead of one that is super efficient at one thing like the ones we use in industry right now.
There are a lot of use cases, but they all assume the robots reach a certain level of precision, speed and adaptability, which we are still far from.
Honestly I find it really hard to imagine a humanoid robot (at least without muscle induced mobility) maintaining an aircraft/plumbing and so on.
I can imagine the use case. I don't see this tech being anywhere close to maturity in this decade though. The amount of processing power would be CRAZY to deal with these tasks, no? Computer vision + motor skills. Add actual mobility to that. What would be the power source? Definitely not a battery! Would it be like a cable connected to a wall outlet or something?
Dude I'd totally ride a C5 in 2024, that thing looks like it's a perfect alternative to those scooters that are everywhere. At least now you could use lithium batteries and beefier motors instead of the garbage they had back then.