While Valentino Rossi completed one lap in a matter of 86 seconds, Motobot took an additional 30 seconds to cover the same track
A couple of years back, Yamaha introduced a quite bold concept in the form of Motobot robot. The ideology behind this concept was to develop a robotory machine that could create new records on the racetrack and this will eventually help the company develop new technologies in future. For this purpose, the Motobot was made to ride a Yamaha R1M motorcycle and it went through a good number of crashes in the initial attempts.
Recently, the company has revealed a video that shows Motobot and nine time MotoGP world champion Valentino Rossi competing with each other on the Thunderhill Raceway Park that is almost 2 mile long. While Valentino Rossi completed the lap in 85.7 seconds, the Motobot took over 30 seconds extra and took 117.4 seconds to finish one round of the circuit.
The footage ends with the phrase “We can still learn more, so the ride shall continue”. This gives a clear hint that Yamaha will be working further in order to reduce this timing gap and make the Motobot even faster.
Motobot being a robot, has its own limitations. The machine is made to sit on the R1M just like a normal human being, however, in a forward leaning posture. The robot has been assisted with a number of sensors and has been designed in a way that it has been offered full control of various motorcycle riding operations like whacking up the throttle, managing clutch and gear synchronisation and a lot more.
Valentino Rossi, on the other hand, is an expert in riding motorcycles and can transfer his body weight on one side or the other as per the requirement in order to extract more output. The Motobot cannot do this as it has been fixed in the seat of the motorcycle. Now, it will be really interesting to see with what future improvements does the Motobot comes and if it manages to beat Rossi one day on the racetrack or not!
In other news, Yamaha YZF-R15 V3.0 has been recently spotted testing in India for the very first time. The test mule is seen with MRF tyres and conventional forks upfront to carry out cost cutting. The bike will likely be launched here within the next three months.
Yamaha Motobot Images
