As a qualifier, missing by 30 seconds on a 85 second lap is not very close.<p>But a 1:55 at Thunderhill would be consider a fairly decent amateur time on a 600cc bike so they are definitely making progress.
As long as they have the robot sitting there static, they're going to be hard pressed to beat a human. There's a lot more going on on a bike than just fiddling with the throttle and steering
It is using GPS for navigation at the moment. I wonder if the reduction in Lidar size and advancements in cameras would mean that in theory these things could be raced in groups. That would be cool.
There's a lot more to racing than simply being able to go fast around a track solo, but this was a fabulous piece of work from Yamaha. This was last summer, I think, so it's a bit late for the Beeb to be reporting on it.<p>Soon, I imagine that the bike will also start to be tailored to the robot in the way that it's tailored to a human (two humans, actually, Rossi and Viñales).
Hello guys,<p>I am finding it hard to understand how they managed to model the system(i.e bike). I am somewhat familiar with control theory(did some undergrad courses on them). But this system seems like a non-linear system and coming up with a mathematical model seems like a herculian task to me.(I once modeled a conical tank and it was not quite easy)<p>Could someday provide me any idea about what they have done here ? How they modeled this system ? What control algorithms they used here ?<p>Any pointers might be helpful as well.<p>P.S - Haven't read about developments in control theory in quite some time now. So forgive me if my comment is quite basic.<p>Thank you.
"We decided that physically attaching Motobot to the bike wasn’t cheating because its hands had to grip the handlebars"<p>Come on guys. This is just like Watson's finger or AlphaGo's precomputation. It <i>is</i> cheating obviously!!
A video of this robot: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjZPvXKewFk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjZPvXKewFk</a>
> “Why a motorbike?” ponders Hiroshi Saijou. “Because it is very difficult to do, and it had never been done before.”<p>I feel compelled to point out that it <i>has</i> in fact been done before. There was an autonomous motorcycle -- Ghostrider -- which was entered into the '04 and '05 DARPA Grand Challenge, and now rests in the Smithsonian. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1332301" rel="nofollow">http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah...</a>