[ExI] robot riding a motorcycle

[BillK]

On 31 October 2015 at 23:55, spike  wrote:
> OK I have been pondering this notion and realize that even fitting the
> ro-bike with visual sensors would be overkill.  I am thinking of a race to
> the bottom for cost; here's what I have so far.
>
> I had in mind those modern racy road bikes that can go over a quarter the
> speed of sound, but that wouldn't be necessary at all, or even desirable for
> an indoor 1/8 mile.  The bikes they use for that are simple dirt bikes with
> street tires, and there is no advantage to having a modern one: any bike
> built in the last 40 years will work fine.  Here are some examples:
<snip>
> So now we are down to any dirt bike regardless of how hard it's been ridden,
> used is fine, a set of ordinary cheapy street tires (or the sticky compound
> Dunlops would work fine) linear actuators for the shifter, clutch, steering
> and front brake, rotational actuators for throttle and if we really want to
> get into the poor-man's racing aspect, just make it a no-shift rule: run the
> whole race in second gear, which eliminates two actuators and a buttload of
> code, probably two MEMS laser gyros, a dual-frequency radio receiver of some
> sort and a microprocessor.
>
> Everything I have imagined here could be done with a 4 digit number of bucks
> and a lot of free volunteer time, which brings up a new question.  If this
> game is this cheap and technologically not so terribly difficult, someone
> somewhere should have thought of it and is doing it already, a tech company,
> a university mechanical engineering class or a private club.  Who and where?
> If not, we need to talk to Stanford and have them get on this before
> Berkeley comes along and whoops their Cardinal asses, then go to Berkeley
> with the same story.  We could have a cool robike showdown, right here at
> the San Jose Fairgrounds, and you know the locals will give a Hamilton to
> see that.  The arena holds enough proles we could even make money on it,
> which makes the whole notion morally justifiable: it disguises a fun
> crazy-ass notion as an ordinary perfectly understandable get-rich-quick
> scheme.
>


You seem to be heading towards reinventing speedway dirt track bike
racing for robots.
Speedway bikes are single gear, no rear suspension and no brakes.
Rider skill is required to slide the bike when cornering without brakes.

But the problem is that simple bike racing is mostly exciting because
of the competition between human riders. Robot racing would get boring
very quickly. Robots can quickly copy the best programs from each
other. The same applies to robot car racing. Once robot cars regularly
win Pikes Peak, people will lose interest.
It is a good technical challenge to build a robot bike, but you need a
better reason than racing them.

BillK