Will autonomous androids built by Elon Musk take over Mars, like he’s promised?Not according to a leading robotics expert.In an interview with Forbes, Christian Hubicki, head of the Optimal Robotics Laboratory at Florida State University, predicted that the centibillionaire’s robots will be doomed to become scrap metal and plastic once left to their own devices on the Red Planet.“Humanoids fall down. They break. Their code crashes,” Hubicki told the magazine. “Right now, humanoids aren’t reliable enough to be autonomous on Earth, let alone Mars.”Musk has pushed his automaker Tesla into a hard pivot toward robotics and AI. He’s essentially staked its entire future on his recently launched Robotaxi service, which he promised investors will balloon the company’s value by trillions of dollars. So far, the autonomous cars haven’t demonstrated they can drive without a human safety monitor, the presence of whom hasn’t precluded a few accidents already.Humanoid robots are the other part of that equation. Tesla’s flagship robot is Optimus, which according to Musk, Tesla will build 100,000 units of per month by next year. There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of that figure, one being that the entire humanoid robotics industry hasn’t proven it can scale or will even have a market it can sell to. With Musk’s bot specifically, a video demonstration of Optimus shared last month was still laughably limited; the robot took painfully long to answer simple questions, glitched out mid-sentence, and walked clunkily.Yet Musk has already figured the unproven humanoids into his infamously grand vision of colonizing Mars, which is part of his even grander vision of expanding “consciousness to the stars.” This April, he proclaimed that Optimus robots will be taken to Mars aboard his Starship rocket by the end of 2026, where they’ll explore the planet’s surface and lay the groundwork for full-blown settlement.He’s recently reiterated that claim, and while admitting that “a lot needs to go right,” provided an incredibly ambitious timeline.“More likely, first flight without humans in ~3.5 years, next flight ~5.5 years with humans,” Musk tweeted in August. “Mars city self-sustaining in 20 to 30 years.”Again, this is a pipe dream. Let’s set aside the fact that Musk is yet to demonstrate that his constantly exploding Starship is even spaceworthy, and focus on the robot angle. While space agencies like NASA have deployed humanoid robots in space, they were “only on space stations where humans are already there to fix them,” Hubicki told Forbes. NASA’s “Robonaut,” for example, was mostly teleoperated by mission controllers and used for simple tasks.“Critically on the [International Space Station], humans are there to help and fix the robot when it inevitably falters,” Hubicki said. “On Mars, there are no humans to rescue it, and replacement parts are a nightmare to ship in.”That isn’t to say that humanoid robots won’t one day be used to explore distant worlds; in Musk’s shoes, Hubicki said he’d send humanoids to the Moon where they can at least cut their teeth. But there’re loads of creative designs out there that may be better specialized for navigating alien terrain. NASA engineers are testing a snake robot designed to crawl down vents on the surface of Saturn’s 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.“Without a major technological leap in humanoid reliability,” Hubicki told Forbes, “an unaccompanied humanoid on Mars wouldn’t be functional for long.”More on robots: Delivery Robot Torments Disabled ManThe post Elon’s Robots Will Quickly Become Dead Husks on Mars, Expert Warns appeared first on Futurism.