Yamaha's motorcycle-riding robot "was created to surpass you"
Motobot was built to take you down.
Take you down on the racetrack, that is. And its sights are set not on you, personally, but on world-class Italian motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi. (And also on humans in general.)
Yamaha made Motobot, an autonomous motorcycle-riding humanoid robot, to demonstrate the power of robotics to surpass human capabilities. It will do this by beating Rossi on the track.
"I am improving my skills every day, but I'm not sure if I can even beat the five-year-old you," the robot tells Rossi in the (kind of creepy) voiceover to a video released by Yamaha when it showed off the machine at the Tokyo Motor Show this week. "Perhaps if I learn everything about you, I will be able to catch up...I am Motobot. I was created to surpass you."
The bike itself -- a powerful $22,000 beast of a racing machine -- is not modified in any way, and the robot's six actuators are designed to twist the throttle, squeeze the brakes and pump the foot shifter just like a person would. (With slight alterations, Yamaha thinks Motobot will also be able to pilot a snowmobile or a jet ski.)
Machine learning -- in tandem with sensors and GPS -- will enable to 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," Yamaha said.
Its goal for 2015 is to hit 62 mph on a straightaway with no intervention, do a slalom course and master cornering. In 2017, it will lap a racetrack at 124 mph.
By 2020, Yamaha hopes to use what it learns from Motobot to improve the kando of driving, a Japanese term which the company defines as "the simultaneous feelings of deep satisfaction and intense excitement that we experience when we encounter something of exceptional value."
Anyone know the proper Japanese word for the feeling of getting left in the dust by an autonomous humanoid?