Milan Kovac becomes Vice President of Tesla Optimus division

Tesla has promoted Milan Kovac as the Vice President of the Optimus robot development division, to advance in AI and computing for future upgrades.

He entered this new role in September 2024 and already spent two months. He previously served as Director of Optimus and Autopilot Engineering from 2022 to October 2024 for 2 years and 10 months.

Kovac has been leading the Optimus program and its engineering team. He was also responsible for engineering teams for all the software foundations and infrastructure for autopilot.

Prior to that, He was director of autopilot software engineering from May 2019 to January 2022 for 2 years and 9 months before getting Optimus division.

Back then, the new Optimus VP contributed and managed several teams within the Autopilot Software group. He implemented a new C/C++ process, a compute scheduler for autopilot, and more.

Tesla Optimus Robot Sorting Battery Cells (Source – Tesla)

On October 10, Telsa hosted a We Robot event and demonstrated the Optimus robot to visitors. Earlier today, Tesla posted a new video for this robot and showed new upgrades. The video walked through the bot within the Tesla facility and how it passes through humans and obstacles.

The video demonstrates the new upgrades in the walk cycle, editing autonomous charging dock, new stair climbing, and more.

(source)