In the promotional video above, the robot issues a challenge to Italian world champion Valentino Rossi.
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In the Tokyo Motor show, Yamaha nailed the non-human-bike-rider-racer concept, made a leaning multi-wheeler, and introduced a more mind-boggling concepts.
The video shows the crouched Motobot on board Yamaha R1M, getting into triple digit speeds, twisting the throttle, apply brakes and change gears on a completely stock bike. The Yamaha Motobot which is greeting show goers at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show is an autonomous humanoid robot which is programmed to ride a motorcycle. But I’m not sure I can even beat the five-year-old you. That’s fine, until it says: “I am not human but there has to be something only I am capable of”. Instead of using human riders to test unknown and potentially unreliable prototype safety equipment, Yamaha can employ the Motobot to ride hundreds or even thousands of test miles before humans get involved. We’ve already seen a few pretty odd designs ourselves, but none of them are anything like what Yamaha just announced: an autonomous, motorcycle-riding humanoid robot called Motobot. “I was created to surpass you”.
Yamaha says that it hopes to use Motobot to develop “advanced rider safety and rider-support systems”, similar to the technologies that auto companies are beginning to implement.
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Yamaha said that, in the future, it’ll be incorporating additional sensors including high-precision Global Positioning System, as well as adding machine learning capabilities to allow Motobot to “make its own decisions regarding the best lines to take around a racetrack and the limits of the motorcycle’s performance, so that it can improve its lap times with successive laps of the track”.
