Tesla’s AI Day 2022 is just 17 hours away, scheduled for October 1 at 11:15 AM AEST and to get everyone even more excited for the event, the official Twitter account has posted a new video.
The video shows two robot hands animating through a range of motion in the fingers, to form the now famous heart from the event invite image. When the first image for AI Day 2 / 2022 was released, many were unsure if the picture was a 3D render or a photo of the hands from TeslaBot.
If you haven’t already, take a look at our AI Day 2022 expectations here.
The video is best viewed on full screen to see the detail of the hands. There are many, many components at work here to enable the hands to move like human hands and the smoothness at which they move is incredibly impressive. The actual metal looks more brushed than polished, but will ultimately be covered, so this is all about showing Tesla’s mechanical engineering, rather than the polished final consumer product.
The lighting effects are a nice touch, but the video confirms a couple of really important aspects of TeslaBot. Firstly Tesla’s ability to create a human-link physique that appears to fit within the design they showed at last year’s AI Day, just over a year ago. While this is just the hands and fingers in the video, it certainly provides excitement that we may be about to see an entire humanoid robot with this detail.
The second thing to note is how the range of motion between each of the joints in the fingers and thumbs reflects humans. We can see from the side-hinge on the thumbs that they will be able to move more than just the grasping motion shown in the video.
The ability to grasp an object is obviously a core competency any useful robot needs to have, but what’s not shown here is if the hands (and reset of TeslaBot) are able to understand objects in the real world, approximate the weight of the objects to carry them, or the strength required to hold and not damage it.
While I didn’t notice during the first look, upon closer inspection, it seems TeslaBot has softer, rubberised grips on the inside of the fingers, helping to answer how a hard metal object would hold objects without them sliding out from it’s grip.
Take a look at the video in the tweet below and let us know what you think in the comments.
If you haven’t already, make sure you set a reminder for AI Day 2022 on the YouTube stream below.
