CONFIRMED: Kawasaki developing artificial intelligence for motorcycles

Kawasaki has announced that it IS working on an artificial intelligence system that will let your bike communicate and adapt to your needs as you ride. The artificial intelligence system will not only be able to ‘talk’ and respond to a rider’s commands, but can change a bike’s set-up, power and handling character exactly as needed by the rider. All of this will be done via a live link to specific AI cloud computing.

So far, so next-generation, but the biggest (and most ‘Knight Rider-y’ part of all of this) is that the AI on the motorcycle won’t ‘just’ be limited to shifting major bike components as needed, but will also feature what Kawasaki calls an ‘Emotion Engine’ which will interpret a rider’s emotions and could give the bike its own personality. Yep, your H2R could literally have a mind of its own, and a mood to match. And it’ll be able to read your mood, too. And talk to you.

The Emotion Engine isn’t the stuff of Arthur C Clarke though, it’s very real and already happening, developed by a company called Cocoro SB which is part of the mega tech giant SoftBank which, incidentally, has recently acquired ARM technologies just outside of Cambridge, one of the world’s leading developers of microchip and small-tech futures.

Although the tech is pretty basic at the moment, the Emotion Engine is here and is moving forward at a rapid rate. Next stop – as officially announced by Kawasaki – is to implement it onto your bikes so your machine can talk to you and (more importantly) listen to you as yyou ride.