Wion: A seven feet tall and 240-pound robot, CUE, plays basketball and has biometrics similar to an average basketball player. At the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the hoop-shooting AI-powered robot made a shot from half court.
“At that moment, I felt like I was watching a fantasy movie (rather than) something I had been a part of,” Tomohiro Nomi, leader of the development team behind CUE and other Toyota humanoid robot projects, told CNN.
CUE started off as an amateur robotics project in 2017 but then appeared in a half-time show at the Olympics, which Nomi says was an amazing feat. CUE has a sensor in its chest which it uses to calculate the angle and power required for each shot.
The robot even has a world record to his name, that of landing over 2,000 consecutive shots. Since shooting hoops has become a walk in the park for the droid, the team is taking things up a notch. The robot is now being taught to dribble. Nomi hopes that “future iterations will have the same range of motion and flexibility as humans”.