R&D – Autonomous motorcycles on the road soon? –

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Autonomous motorcycles on the road soon ?

R & amp; D - Autonomous motorcycles on the road soon? -

Published a few days ago in the very serious Sunday Times, an article on the “ Robo-bike ” developed by a member of the autonomous car program at Google is currently making a lot of noise on the web … Site takes stock for his readers.

A little over two years ago, the State of Nevada (USA) opened its roads to driverless cars. The first company to obtain a license plate for its autonomous Prius prototype, Toyota Google today circulates around ten “Google cars” which have traveled more than a million kilometers.

At the head of this project is a certain Sebastian Thrun, winner of the "Grand Challenge 2005" organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the American agency for "defense advanced research projects"), at the origin among others of the Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the ancestor of the Internet !

A motorcycle (all) alone in the race

The competition consisted of building a vehicle capable of covering a journey of nearly 250 km in the Mojave Desert, in less than 10 hours and in a perfectly autonomous manner. Already launched in 2004, the challenge – rewarded with 1 then 2 million dollars! – had been relieved by 15 teams, but none had crossed the finish line, far from it…

The best team had indeed seen their "Sandstorm" go off the road after 12 km! Worse: the only motorcycle entered in this competition had not held on its wheels for more than … two meters, its brilliant designer Anthony Levandowski having forgotten to activate his self-stabilization system !

However, during the qualifying rounds, the "Ghost Rider" – based on a 90cc Yamaha if one is to believe where it is kept – had outperformed 90 four-wheeled competitors, making Levandowski and his team proud. .

More importantly, this little two-wheeled wonder opened the doors of Google to its creator, where he met Sebastian Thrun and with whom he worked on the in-dis-pen-sa-ble "Google Street View" app. , as well as on an autonomous pizza delivery car…

To find out more about Levandowski, his Ghostrider and his fascinating work at Google, MNC recommends that you read the large article "Auto correct"published on November 25, 2013 in the (or its French translation posted on the blog).

Published this summer on the site of this time, the article "Robo-bike, a very easy ride"also comes back to the Ghostrider project, following a letter from Ron Medford to the California DMV (the body responsible for registering vehicles and driving licenses).

At the beginning of January 2014, the "security" manager within the autonomous car program at Google regretted that the Californian state limits in its legal texts the list of "autonomous" vehicles that can be tested on roads open to passenger cars only….

The article, which partially quotes Mister Medford, may suggest to anyone who browses it too quickly that Google would like to unleash a "Google Bike" in the streets of San Francisco, Mountain View (company headquarters) or Los Angeles. However, it is not !

"Although Google is not currently testing any of the excluded vehicles (motorcycles but also buses or trucks, editor’s note), we believe that the article of law which unnecessarily restricts future innovations should be deleted in its entirety", simply considers Ron Medford.

California, no more than Nevada, Florida, Michigan and the District of Columbia (Washington), where autonomous cars are now allowed to run, will therefore not be invaded tomorrow by "Google Bikes". Lack of opportunities ?!

No Google Bike on the horizon

In the automotive sector, the strengths of complete vehicle autonomy have something to appeal to both manufacturers and States: increased safety, lower consumption, limited "driver" fatigue – even eliminated by a nap. !

In addition, these cars of the future will be accessible to unlicensed or disabled people. The market is therefore promising, to such an extent that Google (still him!) Has started producing 100 .

Even in Europe, "the question is not whether we will ever see fully autonomous cars circulating, but when", said researcher from the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, Natasha Merat, at the third European Biker Forum (read)

The motorcycle without a motorcyclist is moreover not a figment of the imagination: it already exists (the video proof on the following page) … Is its arrival on open roads, as for the car, a question of time ? At Site, we ask ourselves that of its usefulness … And this is not the first time !

In our dossier "Words (o) s and debates" devoted to electronics, we questioned the various players in the motorcycle world on this point: manufacturers of course, but also Bosch. All were skeptical to say the least (read our).

Finally, it is directly on its applications and their relevance on an industrial scale that the future of this hypothetical "motonomist" depends! The delivery of small parcels to remote places, difficult or dangerously accessible, could be a line of thought.

And why do ?

The development and approval of a machine dedicated to this type of task would undoubtedly encounter fewer obstacles in their path than those of the "delivery drones" envisaged – not very seriously – by another American giant (Amazon) in the air !

Rather than in the civil, perhaps it is in the military field that the autonomous motorcycle could find its way. After all, the two great challenges of DARPA in which the two future Google engineers had participated had been financially supported by the American Congress, which then wanted a third of the vehicles in its army to be autonomous by 2015 … Mission accomplished ?

Anthony Levandowski‘s Ghostrider in video

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