A Tesla Optimus robot on the factory floor.
Tesla is currently hiring individuals to assist in training its humanoid robot, Optimus, by donning motion capture suits and mimicking tasks the robot will eventually need to perform.
The job, listed as “Data Collection Operator” on Tesla’s careers page, offers a wage of up to $48 per hour. It involves walking for over seven hours each day while carrying loads of up to 30 pounds and wearing a VR headset for prolonged periods.
Applicants must be between 5’7″ and 5’11” tall, likely aligning with Optimus’ anticipated height of 5’8″. The role, based in Palo Alto, California, includes responsibilities such as uploading collected data, drafting reports based on observations, and occasionally troubleshooting issues.
Candidates are required to have the physical stamina to walk for over seven hours daily and the ability to carry up to 30 pounds.
Over the past year, Tesla has brought on dozens of employees to help train its humanoid robot, Optimus, using motion-capture technology, as revealed by LinkedIn data and reported by Business Insider.
Tesla offers three different shifts for this work: 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., 4 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., and 12 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. While multiple shifts are common in many manufacturing environments, the inclusion of a graveyard shift specifically for advanced robot training does raise some eyebrows.
The most likely explanation is that Elon Musk is pushing hard to close the gap between Tesla and other robot manufacturers who have made significant advancements in recent years.
Experts suggest that Tesla is likely aiming to amass extensive data through this effort.
Animesh Garg, a senior researcher at Nvidia Research and a robotics professor at Georgie Institute of Technology, told Business Insider, “It extremely difficult to produce robots at scale.” He added that Tesla’s Optimus robots are probably custom-built and assembled, with each unit undergoing continuous iterations as the company refines and improves the technology.
“The amount of data collection you’d need would easily be half a billion dollars and the real question is ‘Even if you do that, do you succeed?’ Because there is no guarantee of success,” he explained.
According to The Verge, this extensive training process is fairly standard for humanoid robots and the artificial intelligence systems that power them.
Although Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised to have “genuinely useful” robots in production by next year—a timeline he acknowledges is largely speculative—Optimus doesn’t appear to be significantly further along in development than competing models from Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Apptronik, which are also being tested by other vehicle manufacturers.
Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert from the University of Sheffield, notes that while using motion-capture suits and teleoperation for robot training is not a novel concept, Tesla is one of the first to implement this technique on such a large scale and across a broad range of generalized tasks.
Aitken tells Business Insider, “In the manufacturing world, we typically have a robot that can do one task really really well, but it doesn’t usually extend beyond that.”
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Srishti Gupta Srishti studied English literature at the University of Delhi and has since then realized it's not her cup of tea. She has been an editor in every space and content type imaginable, from children's books to journal articles. She enjoys popular culture, reading contemporary fiction and nonfiction, crafts, and spending time with her cats. With a keen interest in science, Srishti is particularly drawn to beats covering medicine, sustainability, gene studies, and anything biology-related.
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