At nearly seven feet tall and weighing 240 pounds, CUE has biometrics a lot like the average basketball player’s. But CUE isn’t a sports star in the conventional sense: it’s a hoop-shooting AI-powered robot.
At the Olympic Games in Tokyo, in the Summer of 2021, it wowed spectators with a nothing-but-net 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,” says Tomohiro Nomi, leader of the development team behind CUE and other Toyota humanoid robot projects.
CUE, which uses a sensor in its chest to calculate the angle and power required for each shot, originated as an amateur robotics project in 2017, and it achieved the “impossible” by appearing in a half-time show at the Olympics, Nomi says.
However, after landing more than 2,000 consecutive shots in a world-record attempt, shooting hoops has become too easy for this sporty droid.
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