Weekend Awesome - Rossi Meets the MotoBot
Remember the MotoBot, the autonomous motorcycle-riding robot? Yamaha continues to work on MotoBot, to the point where the robot can now ride an YZF-R1M on a race track. That certainly impressed MotoGP star Valentino Rossi who recently checked in with Yamaha’s engineers to see MotoBot in action.
From this video, we can see some progression for MotoBot. In a previous video, we saw the robot riding on open surfaces and now we see it tackling turns on a track. The next step is to make the outriggers retractable so the Motobot could take greater lean angles. Yamaha says it hopes to have MotoBot racing around tracks at speeds of up to 200 kph (124 mph) by 2017.
Yamaha had previously said its goal is for MotoBot to eventually come close to matching Rossi on the track. Some of it was probably showmanship but Rossi’s body language and facial expression suddenly become defensive when the Yamaha engineer mentioned MotoBot challenging him. It’ll be interesting to see how MotoBot continues to develop.
Dennis has been a part of the Motorcycle.com team since 2008, and through his tenure, has developed a firm grasp of industry trends, and a solid sense of what's to come. A bloodhound when it comes to tracking information on new motorcycles, if there's a new model on the horizon, you'll probably hear about it from him first.
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I never talk about other moto sites, but since this one doesn't exist anymore, I don't mind telling you about it. Maybe some of you remember.
Many years ago there was a site called motogpnews.com. It was a brilliant site that satired Moto GP. One of the running jokes on the site was Dani Pedrosa's name. On the site he was known and Pedrobot. There was an elaborate story behind this moniker.
Honda were furious with Rossi for switching to Yamaha. In order to get revenge, they had given trace samples of his DNA to their engineering department and tasked them with producing a cyborg capable of defeating him. This all tied in nicely with how Honda had groomed Pedrosa from the beginning of his career, and how he was the great hope for someone, anyone, who could defeat Vale. On top of it all, Pedrosa had a very monotone, almost robotic, voice in his interviews. The whole story fit quite well, and I couldn't stop calling him Pedrobot until very recently.
All of the pilots got their share of hilarious burlesque, and I'm so sorry that the site is gone. As far as I know, it was owned and operated by a British fan name Stuart Carter. Stuey, if you're out there, thanks for the memories!
I truly don't understand this .. Would people want to watch robots racing motorcycles? Or is it just an engineering exercise? That would be like watching a bunch of Lorenzos riding around the track, making no mistakes, until the one who started in pole won the race ...