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"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" August 20th According to Business Insider, Tesla is recruiting a large number of people with an expected hourly wage of $25.25 to $48 to train its humanoid robot Optimus (Chinese name: Optimus Prime) by wearing motion capture equipment, VR headsets, etc.

Tesla's official recruitment page shows that the position is called "Data Collection Operator", which is divided into two shifts: lunch and evening shifts. The specific working hours are "three shifts", that is, 8 am to 4:30 pm/4 pm to 12:30 am/12 am to 8:30 am. In other words,If the position is recruited to saturation and activated, the Optimus robot will absorb training data 24 hours a day。

The job is not easy. The operator has to walk along a pre-set test route every day to collect data and report the real-time situation. Last year, Tesla's Optimus social media account posted a video showing the specific work content of this position. In the video, an operator wearing a motion capture suit, tactile gloves and a VR headset picks up objects, while the virtual version of the Tesla Optimus robot performs the same action.

In order to complete the above tasks, Tesla officially describes in detail on the recruitment page the conditions that applicants for this position must meet, including but not limited to:

Must be able to walk more than 7 hours per day while carrying 30 pounds;

Ability to wear and operate motion capture suits and VR headsets for long periods of time (Tesla issued a risk warning for VR motion sickness after this requirement);

Able to arrange working hours reasonably: day shift/night shift + 1 weekend + overtime "when necessary".

It is also worth mentioning that Tesla is also recruiting a "Data Collection Supervisor" for this project. Tesla said: "The Data Collection Supervisor will lead our data collection team and become an expert in data collection workflows.Thereby promoting the improvement of Tesla's Optimus program. This role requires a high level of flexibility and the ability to lead a team.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a July 22 tweet: "Next year Tesla will produce a truly useful humanoid robot, but in low volumes for internal use only at Tesla; hopefully by 2026 it will be ready for mass production for use by other companies."

To achieve this goal, Tesla continues to recruit relevant workers to accelerate the effectiveness of Optimus in obtaining data. LinkedIn data shows that in the past year,More than 50 people have worked as "Data Collection Operators"Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert at the University of Sheffield, said that what Tesla did was similar to how it trains its self-driving cars, using massive amounts of data to train artificial intelligence, with the goal of making Optimus learn to act and think like a human more quickly.

▌Effectiveness and safety are questioned

By investing massive amounts of data in betting on humanoid robots, it can be said that Tesla is making an unprecedented attempt, but this has also attracted doubts.

"It is extremely difficult to mass-produce humanoid robots," said Animesh Garg, a senior researcher at Nvidia Research and a professor of robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology. He believes that a large amount of capital and manpower cost investment cannot really guarantee that Optimus will become a multi-tasking and intelligent robot.

The safety of Optimus is also under question. According to media reports last year, at Tesla's factory near Austin, Texas, an engineer was attacked and injured while writing software for a robot (actually a robotic arm). The robot did not stop until his colleague pressed the emergency stop button. According to a survey by The Information, nearly 1 in 21 workers at Tesla's factory in Texas was injured at work, far higher than the industry average accident rate of 1/30. The above incidents have caused people to worry about the safety risks of Optimus.

However, Tesla is still confident in the face of doubts. At the company's shareholders meeting in June this year, Musk said that Optimus robots are expected to make Tesla's market value reach 25 trillion US dollars in the future. By 2025, Tesla factories will have more than 1,000 Optimus robots working, and these robots will perform tasks autonomously.