Yamaha’s initial concept was a “humanoid robot that can ride a motorcycle autonomously” and the company teamed up with SRI International to achieve its vision. SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, as it was originally known, was founded in 1946 to be the cutting edge of innovation in Silicon Valley. The institute has been responsible for the development of such projects as Apple assistant Siri, the computer mouse and humanoid robots such as Proxi, which is designed to assist humans after a natural disaster. Back in 1966 they built the first mobile robot with the ability to perceive and reason about its surroundings.

“Why a motorbike?” ponders Hiroshi Saijou. “Because it is very difficult to do, and it had never been done before.”

“The significance of the 200km/h goal was that it requires extremely high-speed prevision computing. Calculations must take place at 1/1000 of a second – and a minor mistake would be amplified and impossible for Motobot to recover from.

“Most human riders do not have the experience to ride at this speed. So, we set this speed as a good enough target to show that Motobot’s abilities were superior to human’s. Beating Rossi would have been clear evidence that Motobot can perform beyond human capabilities.”

For Brian Foster, robotics engineer and Motobot project lead at SRI International, another goal of the project was to “learn what makes a great rider.

“How riders sense the limits of traction, optimise power output of a bike and recover from exceeding the bike’s limits without crashing,” he says. “Using an unmodified bike was key to this and set the playing field for evaluating the robot versus the human competition.”

This rule meant that the designers then had to deal with constraints on all sorts of things like geometry, the size of the actuators that control the robot’s movements, where sensors were placed and more factors that wouldn’t have been an issue in a purpose-built vehicle. Yes, Motobot was physically attached to the bike but its hand was still required to grip and twist the throttle.

On the other hand, the robot didn’t need to use cameras or lasers to navigate like an autonomous car would because it wasn’t a public road. It could use technologies like the simpler GPS and IMUs (inertial measurement unit), that are often used to control such things as drones and satellites.

There were, however, plenty of challenges for the engineers to face before the robot could ride a bike very fast around the track without crashing it.