Mark Hysell
402 posts
@Mark__Hysell
Radiologist, now retired. 2D/3D digital art, 3D printing, craft beer brewing, home barista https://t.co/AlV8SIPkDw NEO humanoid robot early access reservation
Who thinks Tesla is behind with Optimus? I get the "we don't want our competitors to copy us" argument for demos, but couldn't Tesla just put some gloves and a shirt over Optimus and give us a quick update into what they have cooking? It's been QUIET out there from the Optimii Fwiw I don't think Tesla's behind, I think part of it is optimizing differently and taking different paths to market. NEO is going teleoperator route to ship to customer homes for training. Tesla will likely do plenty of learning in the factories with initial deployment there. The list of differences goes on tbh But the great news is 1X is an American-Norwegian company (main operations in America, founded in Norway) and the faster the market has options from American manufacturers, the better (some motors come from Norway). The main 1X factory currently is in Hayward, CA (~58k sq. ft. + 10k unit capacity/yr.) but a bigger location is set to come online in San Carlos later this year (~231k sq. ft. to hit 100k units/yr.) Plus the VP of Operations is a former SpaceX employee (Vikram Kothari - he spent 8 years there and nearly a decade at Microsoft in hw supply chain leadership)
A letter from the Asimov team to builders all around the world. We have always been open with you, and we want to go over the high-level details one more time. We started building Asimov because we were tired of robots we couldn't open. We deploy robots for a living, and every time one broke, we were stuck waiting weeks for a part from a factory that had no reason to help us. A robot you can't repair isn't really yours. So we decided to build an open one and open-source everything for every builder to build, train, and deploy robots. Asimov 1 is an open-source humanoid robot you build yourself. The first parts are being assembled with our manufacturer now, and the first batch ships in August. To be clear, Asimov 1 is a DIY kit, not a finished robot. It arrives as a box of high quality parts and a manual, and it takes real time and real skill to put together, on the order of 100 hours. Most of the cost sits in the actuators, industry-class ones that run around $30k if you buy them one at a time. The kit is really a group buy. We negotiated them down to near cost, and added a manual that has done most of the hard thinking for you. Good news. We hit our target on the kit itself. With tariffs and shipping on top, it's around $20k. The reason we are doing this is bigger than one robot. We want an open, repairable robotics ecosystem that doesn't depend on any single company or country. We ship in small batches, so you build alongside other people going through the same thing at the same time. You get stuck together, figure it out together, and come out understanding the machine end to end. It is early, it is messy, and it is real. If that sounds like your kind of thing, come build it with us. Pre-order your Asimov 1: asimov.inc/diy-kit Keep going
The background to this campaign was the rug on my living room floor
Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability. For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.
