Former Tesla scientist unveils plan for a lightweight humanoid robot built in Europe

A former Tesla research scientist who worked on the Optimus humanoid robot has unveiled plans for a lightweight, European-developed humanoid robot aimed at manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and home use, Bloomberg reports.

What we know about the project

The project's founder was previously part of the engineering team behind Optimus, Elon Musk's program to build a humanlike robot for Tesla's factories. Now he is launching his own product, and he is betting on a lightweight design and versatility rather than power and payload capacity.

• The founder is a former member of Tesla's Optimus engineering team
• The robot is billed as lightweight, unlike competitors' heavy industrial humanoids
• Target use cases are factory floors, logistics warehouses, and households
• Development is taking place in Europe, not the US

Why a lightweight humanoid?

Most first-generation industrial humanoid robots are heavy, expensive machines built for specific repetitive tasks, such as carrying boxes or loading conveyors. A lighter design opens a different path: the robot is cheaper to build and maintain, safer to operate around people, and easier to adapt to different jobs, from the warehouse to the home. Versatility, not brute strength, is increasingly cited as the key competitive factor for the second wave of humanoid robots.

Why have humanoid robots become an arms race?

Optimus remains one of Tesla's flagship projects. Musk has repeatedly called it potentially the company's biggest future source of revenue and promises to start using the robots in Tesla's own factories within the next few years. Meanwhile, competitors have entered the market: Figure AI, Agility Robotics with its Digit robot, China's Unitree, and industry veteran Boston Dynamics with Atlas. Most of them focus on industrial tasks such as packing, sorting, and moving goods, and are only gradually moving toward household use cases.

Europe has so far remained on the sidelines of this race. Most capital investment and pilot deployments of humanoid robots are concentrated in the US and China, where manufacturers face labor shortages in warehouses and on assembly lines and are willing to invest in automation. A project with a Tesla-pedigreed team and a European base could shift the balance of the market, especially if the developers manage to deliver a more compact, lighter machine than the current leaders offer, while also addressing similar labor shortages in European manufacturing and logistics.

What it means

The exodus of Tesla engineers into their own startups shows that the humanoid robot market is entering a phase of active diversification. Alongside giants like Tesla and Figure AI, niche players are emerging that bet on lightweight, affordable models, and the technology itself is gradually spreading beyond the US and China to Europe.