Two Tesla Bots on stage Musk showed two robots. The first, walking model was built with off-the-shelf mechanical actuators, cylindrical devices that combine a motor with gearing and sensors. The second, whose limbs and fingers were controlled by Tesla's own actuators, couldn't walk and was wheeled out on stage. But its actuators let it lift its leg out to the side and grip with its hands. In a video, the bots could do more, including picking up boxes, holding a watering can for plants and turning at the waist. "It wasn't quite ready to walk, but I think it'll walk in a few weeks," Musk said of the second Optimus robot. Tesla already had actuator engineers on staff for its vehicles. The strongest actuator, a linear model used in the Optimus leg, can hoist 1,000 pounds. The second Optimus prototype weighs 161 pounds (73 kilograms). It uses a variation of the same computing hardware that powers Tesla's FSD autonomous vehicle technology. Its battery pack has a capacity of 2.3 kilowatt hours, "perfect for a full day's work," one engineer said. It consumes about 100 watts of power sitting and 500 watts when walking briskly. That's something like a high-end gaming PC. Watch this: Tesla AI Day 2022: The Biggest Announcements 14:34 The first robot walked at a slow, shuffling pace, with one foot placed just in front of the other. Its bent knees gave it a somewhat mincing gait, but that posture is common for robots since a straight-leg stance requires much more precise balance abilities. The robot was able to turn and flex at the waist. Its body was studded with mostly green LEDs, and its chest featured a large computer with dual spinning fans to cool the processors. Tesla engineers emphasized the degrees of freedom in the Optimus robots -- essentially the different ways it can bend or twist at different joints. The full robot body has more than 28 degrees of freedom, and each hand has 11, Tesla said. For safety reasons, the robots will include an external mechanism so people can stop them, Musk said, and that override mechanism won't be updatable over the internet. In the longer run, for safety reasons, the robots likely will be "governed by some laws of robotics that you cannot overcome, like not doing harm to others," Musk said, a reference to the three laws of robotics from science fiction author Isaac Asimov. Tesla uses the same AI software to control the Tesla Bot as it uses in its cars. Some of the same technology applies, like gauging "occupancy" of nearby areas. It's just trained with real-world environments instead of driving video, Tesla said. Musk didn't hold back on the sci-fi promises for Tesla's robots. With robots at work, economics enters a new age, a "future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty, a future where you can have whatever you want in terms of products and services," Musk said. "It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it." Smart Home Guides