Yamaha’s motorbike-riding robot wants to be world champion

Yamaha’s new humanoid robot, Motobot, just learned to ride a motorbike and already it’s talking trash. At the recent Tokyo Motor Show where Motobot was unveiled, it announced that the reason it was created was to simply “surpass you.” Presumably, that means piloting a 1000cc Yamaha R1M around a racetrack at over 200kmph, and beating MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi.

Blathering on in a voice font crafted to ambiguous perfection, Motobot further inquires of us: “There has to be something only I am capable of?” Indeed there is one, and perhaps only one edge that Motobot now has on the track — it can’t die. While that advantage is a power that should never be underestimated in human-robot interaction, it’s going to take a lot more than courage to best a real rider around the track.

Without an impressive flagship robot, many Japanese companies might be devoid of vision. For nearly a decade, engineers everywhere have been inspired to greatness by the dance moves sported by Honda’s Asimo robot. Toyota’s equally impressive violin-playing robot delicately displays just how good predictive servo loops fed by 1,000+ encoder ticks-per-rev can be. However, actual sport usually entails a bit more than just cuing up a pre-programmed sequence or rant.


Although in theory you could program in the perfect track run as easily as you would plot a course in Pac-Man, the realty is that in any interesting endeavor, there will always remain enough unpredictability to wreak havoc. In other words, as the “undisputed truth” himself (boxer Mike Tyson) was often fond of saying — “every robot has a plan till it gets punched in the mouth.’ Yamaha’s approach of using a humanoid robot to autonomously pilot a largely unmodified motorbike probably isn’t the easiest way to do it, but there are certainly many merits to that conception.

At this point, it would seem that any new vehicle technology worth its salt would have at least some minimal capability for a default autonomous recovery mode in the event of human failure. As an example of this, consider that the mandatory retirement of pilots beyond a certain age, even those flying with co-pilots, is precisely scaled to the incidence of heart attack. If self-driving car technology is to be more than a fiction, then it might be fair to ask where is that minimal program and hardware that safely powers down a school bus when the heart of its aging veteran driver suddenly falters?