Tesla Bot can walk very slowly and pick up stuff now

Tesla is showing off new footage of its Tesla Bots in what appears to be a production-ready chassis, now walking forward (slowly) without some of the stumbles we’d seen in their first reveal. The robots can also apparently do other things, like pick up items and recognize objects.

The new video was presented by Elon Musk during today’s shareholder meeting event, with Musk claiming the team just put it together the night before.

Tesla’s Bot, which is designed as a humanoid robot, was originally revealed last year at the company’s AI Day event. At the time, Tesla could only show a deconstructed version of the bot that robot could barely walk forward, let alone perform any manual labor on stage. A version that was supposed to be closer to a production model was shown but was held up by a stand and could only wave to the audience. Now, Tesla is showing robots more like that model but moving around independently, if a bit slowly.

The video highlights some specific updates to the Tesla Bot project, including motor torque control, environment discovery and memorization, AI training from human-tracked movements, and manipulating objects. One Tesla Bot was shown picking up objects from one container and putting them in a second container, which was also demonstrated as an example of training the bot’s AI from a human demonstration.

Now after seven months, it looks like Tesla’s bot is on its way to becoming some sort of product, far and away ahead of its beginnings as, well, a guy in a suit. Tesla will presumably begin production on Tesla Bot sometime after the company delivers its first long-awaited Cybertrucks.