What if Robotic Bicycles with Robots On Them Where Allowed to Enter the Tour de France?

Back about 6-years ago, I attended the first DARPA Challenge with robotic cars trying to autonomously drive across the desert. Autonomously, is not by remote control, it means completely on their own, as they would sense the terrain, avoid it, and figure out how to stay on the course, in this case driving through the desert without hitting desert turtle, cacti, boulders, or wayward rattle snakes. Okay so, that was an eye-opening experience to watch indeed.

Turns out no one won the challenge, all the robotic vehicles failed; they all crashed and burned as we say in the aerospace industry, yep all of them, along with a self-driving motorcycle. Ah, a self driving motorcycle you say? That's right, and it stayed up-right using gyros, and although it had a tough time starting, it was about the coolest invention and innovation that I'd seen in a long time. Definitely give that inventor an "A+" for effort indeed.

Well, if he can invent a self-driving motorcycle, and we now have electric bicycles, why can't we make a - oh, so now you see where I am going with this - self-riding bicycle and enter it in the Tour de France for 2012. And no, the world is not coming to an end in 2012, and if it were, I'm sure it would wait for the most well-known bicycle race in the World. Okay so, even if the robotic bicycle ran out of juice on some of the mountain roads in the Alps, or crashed along the way trying to negotiate riding in the Pelaton, maybe within a few years it might actually complete the entire course, as the systems were improved.

Look, it won't be long now until we have self-driving cars, heck, Lexus already has a self parallel parking feature, and Google already has a pretty safe self-driving vehicle with permission from Nevada to drive the contraption on an highway, so all this is doable, possible, and within the stretch of the imagination for the future. So, why not a Tour de France self-riding bicycle to compete where Lance Armstrong and the other Yellow Jersey winners left off?

Let's mix it up a little. After all, robots are people too, they deserve rights, and the right away, so why not make them earn their keep, prove their strength and compete with humans head-to-head in the most exciting and challenging bike race on planet Earth? Please consider all this and think on it.