Tesla ramps up hiring for humanoid robot, including reinforcement learning

Tesla is ramping up hiring for its humanoid robot program, Optimus, including some reinforcement learning engineers.

It was hard to take Tesla Bot seriously when Elon Musk announced it by having someone dressed as a robot dance on stage.

To this day, many people are taking the project seriously, but Tesla certainly is.

The latest demonstration of Tesla Optimus prototypes was way more impressive – giving the project more credibility.

Tesla now has a basement full of humanoid robot prototypes where it is trying to teach them tasks using the same neural net-based strategy as it does for its “Full Self-Driving” system.

Electrek has been tracking job postings for the Optimus and we found that Tesla is ramping up hiring lately.

While previous job postings focused on robotics and building a bipedal robot, the new job postings are often more about how to make the robot useful.

For example, Tesla is looking for a “Reinforcement Learning Engineer, Tesla Bot.” In the job description, Tesla explains what the job entails:

Tesla is on a path to build humanoid robots at scale to automate repetitive and boring tasks. The goal of our reinforcement learning team is to build and demonstrate a general robot learning system that can leverage AI to perform complex physical tasks, ranging from full body locomotion, precise manipulation, and more. Our reinforcement and imitation learning engineers are responsible for end-to-end robotic learning and own this stack from inception to deployment. Most importantly, you will see your work repeatedly shipped to and utilized by thousands of Humanoid Robots in real world applications. 

Furthermore, Tesla writes in new job descriptions for “Software Engineer, Robot Software Engineering” that the work will eventually include managing Tesla Bot on the factory floor:

The Robot Software Engineering team is responsible for designing, building, and integrating various types of mobile robots and vehicles to facilitate the movement of people and parts within and between all Tesla facilities worldwide. This includes the management of AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robots), Vertical Storage Systems, conveyor system and the potential usage of Tesl aBot on the factory floor.

The automaker has also added a dozen other new job postings related to the program.

While there’s no official timeline for the Optimus robot being available, Tesla has said that it has become a priority, and it plans to soon start using it as part of its own operations to prove usability ahead of a commercial launch.