That's pretty much the coolest thing I've seen all week.
When this robot – Motobot – stops driving, you feel like it could climb off the bike and hunt you down as well – but it can’t, yet. Motobot 2.0 is a fully autonomous motorcycle-riding robot that was specially designed to drive around a racetrack at high speed on a Yamaha YZF-R1M, the same kind of motorbike that racing legend Valentino Rossi rides. Human operators can specify how aggressively Motobot should race on a scale of zero to 100% and it does the rest. This process is roughly parallel to how a racing team might discuss strategy with a human rider. The bike itself looks like the classic modern aerodynamic racing bike that overtakes you on the motorway.
In September, the team that developed Motobot 2.0 achieved one of its goals when the robot successfully hit speeds exceeding 200km/h (124 mph) on the race track – 50 km/h faster than its predecessor Motobot 1.0. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, this still fell short of the lap time of Valentino Rossi – which they were trying to beat – by about 30 seconds.
Hiroshi Saijou thinks the “cost to learn” is the reason why we didn’t see any depressing headlines about AI beating another human world champion. “The most significant one is the cost – not only money but time and resources - to learn,” he says. “AI for a board game, such as AlphaGo, can learn how to play and how to win pretty quickly since there is no risk of it getting damaged. I believe that there were millions of failures before it eventually won over a human champion. For Motobot, the learning cost is way more expensive and repairs take a long time. So, we needed to take extraordinary care each time we did a trial.”
The future of Motobot, it seems, might be on two legs. Motobot is different from most humanoid robots because it doesn’t walk… yet. But future versions might be able to walk up to the bike and get on it.
It will also wear a leather jacket and sunglasses and come out with memorable one-liners...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180126-meet-the-motorbike-racing-robot
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