TL;DR: A new fleet of Optimus robots is patrolling the Texas Gigafactory fully untethered and sorting battery cells autonomously.
Elon Musk promised an army of robots, and it looks like the vanguard has arrived in Texas.
The latest footage out of Gigafactory Texas shows half a dozen Optimus bots walking the floor. The clunky gait from last year is mostly gone. They look much smoother now, and more importantly, they’re doing actual work instead of just waving at investors.
The robots are apparently using the same end-to-end neural network architecture as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. They observe human workers sorting battery cells and then just replicate the task. It’s wild to watch a machine learn a physical job purely by watching video data. The battery sorting task is repetitive and dull. That makes it the perfect entry point for a humanoid that never gets tired or needs a coffee break.
Tesla still has a long way to go before Optimus is folding our laundry at home. But seeing them deployed in a real industrial environment proves the hardware is finally catching up to the hype.