Tesla’s Optimus Conquers Hills and Learns to Bounce Back

Telsa shared a video of its Optimus robot now able to walk up and down hills. This robot is now looking more and more like a Terminator.

“Optimus can now walk on highly variable ground using neural nets to control its electric limbs,” said Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Join @Tesla if you want to work on interesting real-world AI systems.”

A video below shows Optimus going up and down a hill, with the caption, “daily walks help clear your mind.”

Check it out below. One of the coolest parts of the video is when Optimus slips but is able to recover:

Daily walks help clear your mind pic.twitter.com/dUsW58trS6

— Tesla Optimus (@Tesla_Optimus) December 9, 2024

Milan Kovac from Tesla, said, “These runs are on mulched ground, where I’ve myself slipped before. What’s really crazy here is that for these, Optimus is actually blind! Keeping its balance without video (yet), only other on-board sensors consumed by a neural net running in ~2-3ms on its embedded computer.”

Exciting progress is underway as we work on adding Vision to improve planning capabilities, making the gait appear more natural on rough terrain, enhancing responsiveness to velocity and direction commands, and teaching Optimus how to fall safely and minimize damage when unavoidable—plus how to stand back up, said Kovan.

Join us in advancing fascinating areas like reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and foundation models for robotics as we bring Optimus to everyone, faster than ever, touted Kovac, concluding with “we’re doing it.”

We previously saw Optimus able to catch a tennis ball and now it’s walking better than drunk humans. To be able to walk blind is amazing.