Optimus Gen2

Tesla's Optimus Gen 2 represents a significant evolution in humanoid robotics, unveiled in December 2023 as the second-generation prototype of Tesla's ambitious bi-pedal robot designed for unsafe, repetitive, or mundane tasks. Standing at 173 cm tall and weighing approximately 56 kg (a 10 kg reduction from Gen 1), Optimus Gen 2 features a sleek, human-like form factor with enhanced mobility and dexterity. Its architecture centers around Tesla-designed custom actuators and sensors integrated seamlessly with electronics and wiring, minimizing bulk and improving efficiency. The robot boasts 28 degrees of freedom overall, including groundbreaking 11-DoF hands per side equipped with tactile sensing on all fingers, enabling precise manipulation of delicate objects like eggs without breakage. Mobility has seen a 30% improvement in walking speed, reaching up to 8 km/h, facilitated by foot force/torque sensors, articulated toes mimicking human foot geometry, and a 2-DoF actuated neck for better head movement and environmental awareness. Balance and full-body control are achieved through advanced proprioception and inertial measurement units (IMUs), allowing smooth crouching, waving, and navigation. At the core of Optimus Gen 2's intelligence is Tesla's end-to-end neural network architecture, adapted from its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. Vision-based perception relies on multiple high-resolution cameras (likely similar to Tesla's HW4 suite with 5MP+ sensors) for monocular depth estimation, object detection, and semantic segmentation, trained on billions of video frames from Tesla's vehicle fleet and robot teleoperation data. These networks output birds-eye-view representations and planning tensors, enabling zero-shot learning from human demonstration videos. Motion planning and control use reinforcement learning and imitation learning models, processed on custom inference hardware akin to Tesla's Dojo tiles and HW5 AI chips, achieving low-latency (sub-100ms) glass-to-action responses. No LLM integration is confirmed, but potential for multimodal models exists. Real-world deployment history began with prototypes in Tesla factories by mid-2024, where Gen 2 units demonstrated sorting battery cells, folding shirts, and basic assembly tasks autonomously. By late 2025, Tesla reported deploying several dozen units internally for material handling and quality inspection, reducing labor by 20-30% in pilot areas. Production ramp-up targeted thousands of units for factory use in 2025, with external sales eyed for 2026 at under $30,000 per unit. Challenges included scaling actuator reliability and edge-case navigation, but iterative OTA updates via Tesla's CI/CD pipeline accelerated improvements. Optimus Gen 2's architecture emphasizes scalability, leveraging Tesla's vertical integration in batteries (2.3 kWh torso pack for 8+ hour runtime), motors, and compute, positioning it as a frontrunner in embodied AI for industrial automation, healthcare assistance, and home tasks.