[fragmede]

Having Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons at home is the vision of the future being sold, but as you point out, that level of technology is very much still the realm of science fiction. If you're watching the other parts of the AI conference this was presented at, self-driving cars are practically here. The reality, of course, is that that actually aren't yet. But you can buy a Tesla today to get an electric car taste of that future, even though it's not actually quite here.

A bipedal furniture dolly, however, is as unsexy as it is possible, using today's technology. It requires none of the impossible breakthroughs, though energy storage seems like it would be a problem. (Quad-copter drones seem to have follow as a control scheme figured out already.)

Doing this under Tesla means the earliest versions don't need to sell at all, they just need to be useful internally. Which I'm sure is why this is coming up in the first place. Think of all the places a forklift can go in a factory vs a human. The forklift is extremely useful, but still limited to flat, paved terrain. A bipedal robot base solves that, enabling Tesla to make more use of available space.

If this bot follows Tesla's strategy for self-driving (which still isn't here), it'll ship with "all the necessary hardware for Rosie the robot maid-mode", and then consumers will have to wait another couple decades for the software to actually catch up.