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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: CFOTO\/Future Publishing via Getty Images \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Will autonomous androids built by Elon Musk take over Mars, like he\u2019s promised?<\/p>\n
Not according to a leading robotics expert.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Forbes<\/a>, Christian Hubicki, head of the Optimal Robotics Laboratory at Florida State University, predicted that the centibillionaire\u2019s robots will be doomed to become scrap metal and plastic once left to their own devices on the Red Planet.<\/p>\n \u201cHumanoids fall down. They break. Their code crashes,\u201d Hubicki told the magazine. \u201cRight now, humanoids aren\u2019t reliable enough to be autonomous on Earth, let alone Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk has pushed his automaker Tesla into a hard pivot toward robotics and AI. He\u2019s essentially staked its entire future on his recently launched Robotaxi service, which he promised investors will balloon the company\u2019s value by trillions of dollars. So far, the autonomous cars haven\u2019t demonstrated they can drive without a human safety monitor<\/a>, the presence of whom hasn\u2019t precluded a few accidents already<\/a>.<\/p>\n Humanoid robots are the other part of that equation. Tesla\u2019s flagship robot is Optimus, which according to Musk, Tesla will build 100,000 units of per month by next year. There\u2019s plenty of reason to be skeptical of that figure, one being that the entire humanoid robotics industry hasn\u2019t proven it can scale or will even have a market it can sell to<\/a>. With Musk\u2019s bot specifically, a video demonstration of Optimus shared last month was still laughably limited<\/a>; the robot took painfully long to answer simple questions, glitched out mid-sentence, and walked clunkily.<\/p>\n Yet Musk has already figured the unproven humanoids into his infamously grand vision of colonizing Mars, which is part of his even grander vision<\/a> of expanding \u201cconsciousness to the stars.\u201d This April, he proclaimed<\/a> that Optimus robots will be taken to Mars aboard his Starship rocket by the end of 2026, where they\u2019ll explore the planet\u2019s surface and lay the groundwork for full-blown settlement.<\/p>\n He\u2019s recently reiterated that claim, and while admitting that \u201ca lot needs to go right,\u201d provided an incredibly ambitious timeline.<\/p>\n \u201cMore likely, first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans,\u201d Musk tweeted<\/a> in August. \u201cMars city self-sustaining in 20 to 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, this is a pipe dream. Let\u2019s set aside the fact that Musk is yet to demonstrate that his constantly exploding Starship<\/a> is even spaceworthy, and focus on the robot angle. While space agencies like NASA have deployed humanoid robots in space, they were \u201conly on space stations where humans are already there to fix them,\u201d Hubicki told Forbes. NASA\u2019s \u201cRobonaut,\u201d for example, was mostly teleoperated by mission controllers and used for simple tasks.<\/p>\n \u201cCritically on the [International Space Station], humans are there to help and fix the robot when it inevitably falters,\u201d Hubicki said. \u201cOn Mars, there are no humans to rescue it, and replacement parts are a nightmare to ship in.\u201d<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t to say that humanoid robots won\u2019t one day be used to explore distant worlds; in Musk\u2019s shoes, Hubicki said he\u2019d send humanoids to the Moon where they can at least cut their teeth. But there\u2019re loads of creative designs out there that may be better specialized for navigating alien terrain. NASA engineers are testing a snake robot<\/a> designed to crawl down vents on the surface of Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus to explore its subsurface ocean, and possibly the Martian ice caps. The thing to bear in mind, though, is that these are still just possibilities, and trying to force a human-like design only makes things even harder.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout a major technological leap in humanoid reliability,\u201d Hubicki told Forbes, \u201can unaccompanied humanoid on Mars wouldn\u2019t be functional for long.\u201d<\/p>\n