Tesla factory workers are reportedly balking at wearing sensor suits to train the Optimus robots meant to eventually replace them

[GoldbergFan86]

Tesla has been asking workers at its Texas and California factories to wear special sensor suits that record their physical movements while they work, using imitation learning to feed that motion data into the training of its Optimus humanoid robots, according to reporting citing sources at The Information. Some employees reportedly complained about taking part, telling the outlet they knew the robots were designed to eventually replace them, creating an unusually direct tension between the workers doing the training and the machines being trained on their own movements.

Tesla has since shifted a significant amount of this data collection away from ordinary factory workers and toward dedicated training teams, setting up specialised training hubs staffed specifically for that kind of motion capture work rather than pulling it from the general workforce. The move follows a series of technical setbacks reportedly affecting the Optimus programme, including defective manufacturing that has required immediate robot repairs, unreliable touch sensors that pushed Tesla to develop replaceable sensor gloves instead, and a general shortfall in the robots' AI capability that still requires specific task by task programming rather than genuinely flexible, general purpose operation.

The reporting also notes Tesla's heavy reliance on Chinese suppliers for Optimus components, a dependency that sits alongside a competing robot exhibition held in Hangzhou, China on September 23, underlining just how competitive and geographically contested the humanoid robotics race has become even as individual companies work through their own manufacturing and training difficulties.

Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacementsarstechnica.com