Valentino Rossi outrides MOTOBOT automated motorcycle
By Ben Purvis
Has written for dozens of magazines and websites, including most of the world’s biggest bike titles, as well as dabbling in car and technology journalism.
30.10.2017
Yamaha's MOTOBOT
Valentino Rossi destroys Yamaha’s robot rider in first head-to-head showdown
Yamaha has put its MOTOBOT into a head-to-head challenge against Valentino Rossi to see how the development of its bike riding robot is going. It was trounced.
In a showdown at Thunderhill Raceway Park, California, MOTOBOT managed a lap of 117.5 seconds riding an unmodified R1M. Rossi’s time on the same spec bike? 85.74 seconds. It looks like we don’t have to welcome our robot overlords just yet.
It’s still a remarkable achievement. Yamaha’s latest video shows the head-to-head and that the MOTOBOT has achieved its goal of exceeding 200km/h. It also shows that it’s not been plain sailing, with a clip of the robot rider crashing at speed during testing.
Yamaha’s goal for the MOTOBOT is to learn more about the intricacies of how we ride bikes. The lessons learnt will go into development of ever-better stability and traction control systems to help make future bikes harder to crash.
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