Toyota’s Basketball Robot Stuns Tokyo Crowd With Flawless Shooting Skills
Toyota’s Basketball Robot Stuns Tokyo Crowd With Flawless Shooting Skills
Toyota’s Basketball Robot Stuns Tokyo Crowd With Flawless Shooting Skills
Toyota debuts Cue7, a more capable humanoid basketball robot with advanced AI. The Tokyo demo shows natural dribbling and shot attempts, a leap from the Cue6, built by Toyota engineers since 2017.
Recently, the Toyota Motor Corp. has launched its new humanoid basketball-playing robot, Cue7. It has more artificial intelligence (AI) controlled movements compared with the previous one, the Cue6, and, therefore, can be used to perform more complex maneuvers, including dribbling more naturally.
Cue7 was shown at halftime of a men's B.On April 12, a league game in the Koto Ward of the capital, in Toyota Arena Tokyo. Once it had got to the top of the court, it came to a basket and, having dribbled three times, it took a free shot. Then it went to the other side of the court and had a 3-point shot. The ball struck the rim and bounced off, but the crowd gave a deafening cheer.
Cue was developed as a voluntary project by Toyota employees, starting in 2017. In 2022 with Cue6, AI control was restricted to certain functions, including the ability to modify the force during the shooting, but the rest of the movements were done according to pre-programmed human-directed programs. It was also disadvantageous in that it would lose balance once any of the two wheels in each foot were not on the ground.
Cue7, on the other hand, employs reinforcement learning, where AI is enhanced through repetition of the same action on a simulator. It also now has one wheel on each foot and not two. Consequently, it is able to make more complicated movements with ease and is less prone to the risk of falling even when moving at high speed.
