Originally published at: Yamaha self-balancing Motoroid 2 bike looks like an AI hallucination | Boing Boing
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Self-balancing bike you say?
How does a moving bicycle stay upright? | Britannica.
In short, a normal bicycle is stable thanks to a combination of the front wheel touching the ground behind a backwards tilt steering axis, the center of mass of the front wheel and handlebars being located in front of the steering axis, and the gyroscopic precession of the front wheel.
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apparently, this one can operate autonomously, driving (slowly) over to the person who wants to ride it.
( one of those links is to youtube )
like you say though, i’m not sure what other purpose “self balancing” has. and those training wheel bumpers are… unusual
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Is that the exhaust just inside where the rider’s leg is going to be?
a distinctly lifelike feel
Pain is very lifelike.
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ebike, so no exhaust or gas tank
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Welp, can’t have a tank-slapper if there’s no tank!
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Here, obviously:
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I misread that as driving (slowly) over the person who wants to ride it, because of dyslexia. Then I didn’t immediately realise I had misread it, because of Tesla.
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That’s how I read it, and it was entirely believable.
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At the risk of drawing my mutant credentials into question, thanks for linking me to my new favorite website.
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You’re welcome, it was new to me, too!
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there’s a few different levels of autonomous driving. i think the last one is called “christine” but i forget why.
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Reminds me of an anime, though those ones were more transformable and mecha
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has a presence more like a lifetime companion
Yikes. Is that something I want? I’m already terrified at the drones they can make out of this.
I went to videos looking for the hand grips, because I couldn’t see them.
I would like to see video of it whipping around a track, not creeping around.
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Yamaha is probably the boldest of the Japanese bike manufacturers from a design and technology perspective.
Honda has the highest production standards but tends to be pretty conservative, Kawasaki bikes are generally the sexiest and Suzuki usually follows Kawasaki’s lead. But Yamaha doesn’t give a fuck about any of that, it just does its own thing and to hell with the consequences.
Witness the rise of the Yamaha 2-stroke with expansion chamber exhaust of the early '70s, the advent of the Powervalve a few years later, the 5-valve cylinder head of the late '80s and the EXUP 4-stroke power valve of the '90s. There was also a hub-centre steered touring bike (the GTS) that made it into production. And witness the V-Max, TDR and TDM that were new concepts, all a decade or more ahead of time.
As for this Motoroid thing, all the bike manufacturers faff around with this sort of thing, producing concepts that never go anywhere. However, Yamaha is mad enough to put its concepts into production!
However, I doubt anything will come of this particular project. It’s an answer to a question no-one is asking. And in any case, motorcycles are already self-balancing once they start to move.
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Stabilisers for traffic lights for when that unwieldy heavy bike becomes a liability could be cool. They’d be like the indicators on a BMW, sure, but they’d still be useful.
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Man, even if those haptic kidney covers (or hip covers or rump covers, wherever) were breakaways, I don’t like that blade shape with the pointy corners. If I wreck in a reverse endo (front wheel goes up and over the rider), those things look too poke-y for me.
Thinking now of Hiro Protagonist’s motorcycle that snow-crashes and dies of the Asherah virus, and wondering what the software and firmware update paths are for such a beast. Because the updates for Teslas often go awry, some legendarily so…
ETA:
Ok but I am asking the other kind of question, like: “where can I test drive one?” or “how could I possibly afford such a thing?” or “would my partner divorce me if I got one?” or “how many banks must I rob?” and so on.
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