What is the Tesla Bot?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a new humanoid robot on Friday, called the Tesla Bot.

The Bot, Musk described, is built on the same technology as the company's semi-autonomous vehicles. "Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels, it kind of makes sense to put those in a humanoid form", he said.

The prototype is aimed to be available next year.

Read more: Tesla unveils own chip for AI training computer Dojo

The bot is designed to navigate through a "world built by humans, for humans", be friendly and "eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks".

Physically, the bot is 5 feet 8 inches tall, can carry up to 20.4 kg, weighs 56 kg, can deadlift 68 kg, and has a movement speed of 8 kmph.

Joking about the design, Musk said they are building it such that a person "can run away from it and most likely overpower it".

"Hopefully that won't happen, but you never know," he said.

Mechanically, the Bot is made of unspecified "lightweight materials", has a screen to display useful information where the face would be, has 40 electromechanical actuators to enable smooth movement, and "human-level" hands.

It also has an onboard FSD computer with all the tools the company uses for its cars like neural net planning, FSD hardware, and Dojo training, along with autopilot cameras.

Speaking about the possible effects of the Tesla Bot on the economy, which he reasoned was built on labour, Musk said "essentially, the future of physical work will be a choice. If you wanna do it, you can, but you won't need to do it".