The Thunderhill Raceway in California’s Sacramento Valley is soaked in the oil of motorsport history.

　　加州圣克拉门托(Sacramento)的雷山赛道(Thunderhill Raceway)是摩托车运动的历史圣地。

　　It is home to the longest automobile race in the United States, known as the 25 Hours of Thunderhill, and last September, it was host to a very different kind of race: a race between man and machine.

　　这里是美国耗时最长的摩托车比赛——雷山25小时拉力赛(25 Hours of Thunderhill)的举办地。而在去年9月，这里举办了一次非常特殊的比赛：真人赛车手和机器人赛车手之间的比赛。

　　In the distance, a motorbike driver took the curves of the course like any other professional rider. It was only up close that reality hit the spectator: the rider wasn’t human. It was a blue humanoid robot that looked like it had stepped straight out of a screenshot from the computer game Halo.

　　在远处，有一位摩托车手像其他职业车手一样熟练地驾车过弯。但是距离靠近后，真实的一幕惊呆了观众们：这位车手不是人类，而是一台就好像刚刚从电子游戏《光环》(Halo)的场景中走出来的蓝色类人机器人。

　　Halo is set in an interstellar war between humanity and a bunch of aliens called the Covenant; you get the picture. When this robot – Motobot ?– stops driving, you feel like it could climb off the bike and hunt you down as well – but it can’t, yet.

　　电子游戏《光环》设置的场景是人类和称作"圣约"(Covenant)的一群外星人之间爆发的星际战争。按照游戏里的情节，当这台名为Motobot的机器人停下来后，你会感觉它会自动下车来追杀你。当然，在现实中它还做不到这点。

　　Motobot 2.0 is a fully autonomous motorcycle-riding robot that was specially designed to drive around a racetrack at high speed on a Yamaha YZF-R1M, the same kind of motorbike that racing legend Valentino Rossi rides. Human operators can specify how aggressively Motobot should race on a scale of zero to 100% and it does the rest. This process is roughly parallel to how a racing team might discuss strategy with a human rider. The bike itself looks like the classic modern aerodynamic racing bike that overtakes you on the motorway.

　　Motobot 2.0是一台全自主摩托车驾驶机器人，它可以驾驶一辆雅马哈YZF-R1M高速行驶。传奇车手瓦伦迪诺.罗西(Valentino Rossi)驾驶的也是这款摩托车。人类操控员只需设定好Motobot的驾驶激烈度——从0到100%，其余的事情全都由它自行完成，过程类似于比赛支持团队与人类骑手讨论比赛策略。摩托车看上去就是一台能够在赛道上迅速超越你的经典现代流线型赛车。

　　In September, the team that developed Motobot 2.0 achieved one of its goals when the robot successfully hit speeds exceeding 200km/h (124 mph) on the race track – 50 km/h faster than its predecessor Motobot 1.0. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, this still fell short of the lap time of Valentino Rossi – which they were trying to beat – by about 30 seconds.

　　9月，Motobot 2.0的开发团队在赛道上成功实现了时速200公里的阶段性目标(比其前身Motobot 1.0的时速快了50公里)。然而不幸却又幸运的是(看你角度如何)，跑完一圈赛道所用时间仍然比假想敌——瓦伦迪诺.罗西要长30秒。

　　Rossi is one of the most successful motorcycle racers of all time, with nine Grand Prix World Championships to his name. His best lap time on the course was a very quick 85 seconds. Motobot tried to break Rossi’s record a second time in October – and failed again.

　　作为有史以来最为成功的摩托车赛车手之一，罗西共赢得九座世界摩托车大奖赛(Grand Prix World Championships)奖杯。他的最快赛道记录是惊人的85秒。Motobot在10月第二次尝试打破罗西的记录，不过依旧失败了。

　　“We had several major crashes, two were catastrophic,” says Hiroshi Saijou, CEO and managing director at Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley, and the lead on the Motobot project. “Nobody was injured, and both happened in safe, to human, controlled circumstances. Several times we’ve had low-speed incidents as we were developing and testing Motobot. This is all part of the price of pushing the boundaries of technology.”

　　我们撞过好几次车，其中有两次非常严重，雅马哈汽车投资公司和实验室硅谷公司CEO兼董事总经理西条浩司(Hiroshi Saijou)说，他同时担任Motobot项目主管。"事故中没人受伤，事故时，摩托车和机器人处于对人安全的受控状态。在我们开发测试Motobot的过程中还发生了几次低速事故。这些事故都属于探索未知科技领域时必须付出的代价。"

　　Motobot started life in 2014 as a ‘moonshot’ project for Japanese motorcycle manufacturer Yamaha. Moonshots are those “it would be great if they worked but…” projects: ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking but with little hope of short-term profitability.

　　日本摩托车制造商雅马哈公司于2014年启动了Motobot项目，并给它打上了"登月"项目的标签。"登月"项目是指具有前瞻性、探索性和突破性，但却在短期难以盈利的研发项目。

　　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.

　　雅马哈的最初想法是开发一台"能自主驾驶摩托车的类人机器人"，并与SRI国际研究所合作实现这一目标。始建于1946年的SRI全名为斯坦福研究所(Stanford Research Institute)，一直处在硅谷科技研发的最前沿。研究所曾经的开发成果包括苹果语音助理Siri、计算机鼠标和能够在自然灾害后协助救灾的Proxi等类人机器人。早在1966年，他们就制成了能够感知周围环境并做出推理的可移动机器人。

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

　　为什么要开发一台摩托车机器人?西条浩司自问。"因为这难度很大，并且从未有人成功过。"

　　“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.

　　要开发出时速200公里级别的自主摩托车机器人要求高精度与高速度的计算能力。每次计算必须在千分之一秒内完成，哪怕一个微小的错误也会被急剧放大，并且超出Motobot自我校正的能力范围。

　　“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.”

　　大多数人类车手都没有在如此高速下驾车的经验，因此我们认为这一目标足以证明，Motobot的能力超过人类。只要能打败罗西，就能明确证明Motobot的能力能够超越人类。

　　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.

　　对机器人工程师、SRI国际研究所Motobot项目主管布莱恩.福斯特(Brian Foster)而言，项目的另一个目标在于"了解如何才能成为一名伟大的赛车手。"

　　“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.”

　　具体而言，赛车手如何感知牵引力、实现摩托车功率输出最优化、并在摩托车超出稳定极限后校正恢复，他说。"使用一辆未经改装的普通摩托车很重要，也能为人机大战打造一个公平的基础。"