Would You Let This Creepy robot drive You around?

“i am Motobot. I was once created to surpass you.” So says the quite creepy voice in a latest video showing Yahama’s new bike-driving robot, which can use a gearshift, throttle, and brakes to race down a test road on its own. in the end, with GPS and sensors, the robotic must be capable to use computing device studying to experience better than a human.

The prototype raised a query: Will robots ultimately drive us round, as an alternative of self-driving vehicles?

almost definitely now not. “Having a robotic riding a automotive will never be practical,” says Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and pc engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon university who studies self sustaining automobiles. “Humanoid robots may have even larger constraints than people.”

Sensors and processors—which might be already starting to point out up in cars to assist them park or stay in a lane on the highway—would have to be constructed immediately into the robotic, something that’s not possible inside the physical framework of a humanoid robot, he says.

The robotic would also have so as to seem in a rear view or aspect view mirror to navigate as it drives. “this is a particularly difficult downside, and is well addressed through mounting cameras and sensors around the physique of the auto,” Rajkumar says. “it can be a complex ‘resolution’ to a simple drawback.”

Robots are also nonetheless far from being smart sufficient to know once they need to flip round to test the road. “people can do this on account of the much superior intelligence and cognitive capabilities we now have—robots will not have this type of intelligence for an awfully very long time,” he says. “The robotic also wants in an effort to twist its head, making the robotic design that so much more difficult.”

because vehicles already have some self-using features, from automated braking to warnings when you begin to waft out of a lane—and totally self-driving vehicles is also on the highway in 5 years (Teslas and Google vehicles are already principally there)—it is not likely that robotic chauffeurs will trap up earlier than the auto trade is already autonomous.

“lately’s expertise may be very some distance from having the ability to emulate any place just about a someone within the driver’s seat,” says Rajkumar. “The one factor that may be said for the robot is that it will not be distracted but that is about it.”

So what’s the level of Motobot? Yahama plans to make use of the robotic to face in for human riders in trying out, serving to the company learn the way it could toughen future bike design. And it can be a way to show off a bit. by 2017, they are saying the robot will be capable to lap a racetrack higher than the perfect human rider on the earth.