Simply speaking, MOTOBOT is Yamaha?s autonomous motorcycle riding humanoid robot. But how and why have Yamaha decided to try and build a robot that can beat nine-time world champion Valentino Rossi round a track" And more importantly, have they achieved it"

Well according to the guys in charge of the three year MOTOBOT project, it has all been done in ?the spirit of challenge? and they were under no illusions just how difficult that challenge was going to be. The idea, and the thing that makes the project so unique, was to take a bog standard, unmodified motorcycle (in this case a Yamaha YZF-R1M), strap the robot to it and send it off down pitlane to beat Rossi. That differs from normal ?automated vehicles? as usually the automation is built into the vehicle, rather than just plonked on top of it.
Of course, the Yam did need a little bit of faffing with, in order to fix the bot?s botty in place, but to all intents and purposes, the R1M was just a bog-stock bike. It had normal controls, a normal dash, normal bodywork and it even had an ignition key.

They started the ambitious project in partnership with world-leading research institute SRI International with the aim of competing with a real world class riders lap times round a real track, but before they could even begin to do that, MOTOBOT had to learn the basics. In 2015, using levers, pulleys, cams and bits of string, they had the thing weaving in and out of cones at a very sedate pace indeed. B...