Watch: Tesla's humanoid robot ‘Optimus’ performs yoga, greets 'namaste'

Tesla Optimus: Created in 2022, the general-purpose bot is designed to perform tasks that are unsafe, repetitive, or boring.

'Optimus', the general purpose humanoid robot being built by Tesla, was captured performing yoga on Sunday, as the tech giant revealed that the bot is now capable of self-calibrating its arms and legs. CEO Elon Musk also shared a picture on X, featuring the bot in a yoga posture and extending greetings via gesture.

Tesla Optimus, the general purpose bot.

The video, posted on X (formerly Twitter), featured the bot performing a few more ordinary tasks, such as sorting objects autonomously. Created in 2022, the general-purpose bot is designed to perform tasks that are unsafe, repetitive, or boring.

“Its neural network is trained fully end-to-end: video in, controls out," Tesla Optimus, the official X handle tracking its development, said while posting openings for various roles at the firm.

“Using only vision and joint position coders, it can precisely locate its limbs in space,” the company explained. Among other tasks, the bot was seen sorting different coloured blocks autonomously, even while posing distractions while attempting the task. “Optimus can also demonstrate autonomous corrective action capabilities. It can be trained to conduct new tasks, such as un-sorting," it added.

The bot was announced at Tesla's ‘Artificial Intelligence Day’ event in August 2021. Musk had said that Tesla would come up with a prototype by 2022.

In an earlier video posted in March, several bots were seen practising walking around, improving their abilities to navigate and understand their surroundings, and enhancing their memory. The robots were trained using human demonstrations, gradually progressing to more challenging tasks. These tasks were conducted at different speed levels to assess their performance and capabilities.

As for the end objective, Tesla aims at building software stacks that enable the bot to balance navigation, perception and interaction with the physical world.

Other than the bot, Tesla's other projects in this domain include ‘AI inference chips’, training deep neural networks for the Autopilot system, building algorithms that control Tesla's autonomous vehicles among others.