Robot Racing
What's that you say Yamaha has up its sleeve? A motorcycle racing robot?!?
John Newman
Ever felt the world was moving faster than your head concepts can cope with? Then this one's for you as well as those who champion, understand and welcome the amazing technological advances that are accepted and expected as commonplace.
Yamaha have brought to this year's Tokyo Motor Show 'Motobot', a robot that will soon be able to ride a YZF-R1 better than you, and not long after will be lapping race tracks on the Rossi/Lorenzo version, the YZR-M1, faster than the current works rider team.
The blue human-shaped machine is described as an “autonomous motorcycle-riding humanoid robot”. The machine has head and arm and leg appendages that mirror human shapes and is placed on the bike in a familiar racing crouch. But any similarity between it and us homo sapiens ends there.
Yamaha, like many other industrial companies, has many years experience in designing and manufacturing robots for assembly and production tasks. They work faster and more accurately than we can at these type of fine limit repetitive tasks.
The trick Yamaha now want to pull is to turn 'Motobot' into a machine that is capable of performing the multiple complex tasks of piloting a bike at high speed, which at the moment is only in the gift of humans, and then only a relatively small number of those if we're talking race speed.
The current robot has six actuators for throttle, steering, front brake, rear brake, clutch and gear lever. But they are intending to develop high-precision GPS, various sensors and 'artificial intelligence'; what Yamaha call 'machine learning'. The idea is for 'Motobot' to be able to make its own decisions regarding the best lines around a race track so that it can improve lap times with successive laps.
Yamaha says that the aim is to improve future products. Not just motorcycles but also ATVs, snowmobiles etc, and develop 'advance rider safety systems'. Though, at this stage, they are unspecific about what these might be.
Most vehicle manufacturers have programmes which are working towards creating vehicles capable of autonomous driving. Yamaha, however, is looking at creating robots capable of piloting/driving a regular vehicle that has no modifications. Pillion behind a robot anyone?
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