Downward facing BOT! Watch as Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus performs yoga
A video of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus practicing his yoga skills has made waves on social media, with the faceless bot demonstrating impressive balance and coordination.
The video, posted to
Optimus demonstrated flexibility and balance that would put many people to shame as they moved through some basic yoga poses.
Meanwhile, the text on the video reads: ‘After a long day of work, time to stretch!’
Tesla has been developing its robot for a while now, but this latest update shows just how quickly development has progressed since a less-than-impressive debut in 2022.
A video of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus practicing its yoga skills has wowed social media, as the faceless bot demonstrates impressive balance and coordination
As part of Tesla’s AI Day 2022, Elon Musk unveiled an early prototype of Optimus, although it couldn’t do much more than walk around the stage and wave, while a newer version of the bot had yet to be carried off stage by Tesla staff.
It appears the announcement was intended to boost the hiring drive for Tesla’s bot division, as the video was accompanied by a call to “come and help develop Optimus” and to “improve the yoga routine.”
A link to Tesla’s careers page on the Tesla Optimus profile shows advertisements for nearly 100 available positions working on robot development.
The robot also shows impressive software improvements over previous updates, as Tesla Optimus’ official account announced that it now “self-calibrates” using only vision and “joint position encoders.”
This means Optimus can see where his arms and legs are in space, and learn how to accurately perform tasks along the way.
Optimus puts this calibration into practice by sorting colored blocks into different bins and works quickly even if an experimenter throws the blocks out of the robot’s way.
This kind of simple sorting is an important step toward Tesla’s official mission to create a “two-pedal, autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robot capable of performing unsafe, repetitive, or boring tasks,” such as factory work.
Elon Musk has previously said that the robot could be sold on the market for as little as $20,000, meaning future versions of Optimus could work in warehouses and factories as a low-cost alternative to human workers.
Optimus demonstrated flexibility and balance that would put many people to shame as they went through some basic yoga poses
Dr. Jim Fan, senior AI scientist at NVIDIA, speculated on X that Optimus’ smooth hand movements were “almost certainly” trained by imitating the behavior of human operators.
But behind all the agile movements and balancing acts are the software developments that have made such rapid advances in robotic capabilities possible.
Optimus uses a type of artificial intelligence called a neural network, a series of connected algorithms that mimic the way neurons in the human brain work together to make decisions and understand the world.
Neural networks improve themselves by learning from large amounts of data fed into the program so that it can be trained to give better results.
This means that while Tesla uses the same neural network for Optimus as it does for its self-driving cars, the same program can be used for very different tasks.
According to Tesla, Optimus’ AI is fully trained end-to-end, meaning it can decide how to move its limbs directly from visual information.
Dr. Jim Fan, senior AI scientist at NVIDIA, speculated on X that Optimus’ smooth hand movements were “almost certainly” trained by imitating the behavior of human operators.
Dr. Fan explained that this could have been done by having protesters wear a motion capture glove, just like those used in Hollywood movies, or by creating a “VR game” where people could “role play” as Optimus .
“I’m really impressed with the hardware quality,” added Dr. Fan ready.
People on social media are reacting with surprise at the new development, with one user calling it ‘the technology so exciting and yet so terrifying at the same time’.
Others spoke of their excitement for future developments, saying: ‘These videos really create hype for the future, as well as the engineering and passion to jump into this field and join Tesla’
‘The movements are fluid and the aesthetics are also stunning. As I said above, it is a great decision to closely monitor human morphology so that there is no gap in imitating humans.”
People on social media are reacting with surprise at the new development, with one user calling it ‘the technology so exciting and yet so terrifying at the same time’.
Others spoke of their excitement for future developments, saying, “These videos really build the hype for the future, as well as the engineering and passion to jump into this field and join Tesla.
“Please tell the team to keep posting!”