Tesla’s Optimus Humanoid Robot Can Now Do Yoga and Sort Blocks

After its first unveiling last year, Tesla’s Optimus Humanoid Robot is now equipped with more tricks up its sleeves and a step closer to joining the workforce. New progress includes movement as shown by its ability to strike yoga poses and autonomous corrective actions such as sorting colored blocks.

We first learned of Optimus during Tesla’s Annual AI Day last year wherein one model walked slowly while the other had to be wheeled on stage. Fast-forward to today, the humanoid robot can now move without any support and is now capable of self-calibrating its arms and legs. This was further supported by a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, wherein Optimus is seen striking different yoga poses. An impressive feat considering Optimus is about 173cm tall and weighs 57kg.

To further showcase the progress Tesla is making with Optimus, the video also shows how the humanoid robot can properly sort colored blocks. Although it only showed blocks of two colors (blue and green), it was still able to make its point that Optimus has “autonomous corrective action capabilities” that may be useful to achieve various tasks in the work field.

Tesla describes Optimus as a “general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive, or boring”. In hindsight, we see how Tesla plans to integrate Optimus into society to help people in productivity, may it be for private or public use.

With Optimus joining the list of humanoid robots being created, concerns about the impact of robots and AI on employment and safety are raised. However, Tesla’s chief, Elon Musk, assures that Optimus is a friendly robot that is being built for humans, by humans. “At a mechanical level, you can run away from it — and most likely, overpower it,” adds Musk.