Tesla Bot is the company’s troubled Autopilot system in humanoid form

Enlarge / Not sure how those joints will work… (credit: Tesla)

Not content to be an automaker or even an energy company, Tesla now wants people to think of it as a robotics company.

At Tesla’s “AI Day” presentation yesterday, CEO Elon Musk made the surprise announcement that the company is working on a humanoid robot. The endeavor, he argued, makes sense given the company’s experience working toward self-driving vehicles.

“Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said. “We think we’ll probably have a prototype sometime next year.”