Basketball-playing robot with a Guinness record is now learning to dribble too

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.

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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".

An AI-themed event by a volunteer organisation called the Toyota Engineering Society served as the point of inspiration for the robot. With “Slam Dunk” – “Will 20,000 practice shots be enough?” as the motto, the team aimed to create a robotic player capable of 100 per cent accuracy.

The first version of the robot debuted at a game featuring Alvark Tokyo, a Japanese basketball league team. It successfully scored nine out of 10 shots from the free-throw line. Toyota then asked the development team to take it up as an official project.

In the second version, the stand was gone and the robot was made to stand on two legs, increasing its shooting range to seven metres. In the third version, the robot could shoot from the centrecircle. This variation was called CUE3 and tried out for the Guinness World Record for the title “Most consecutive basketball free throws by a humanoid robot (assisted)” in April 2019.

Time between shots was reduced to seconds from three minutes for them to be considered consecutive. The robot set the record at 2,020 consecutive shots (as a reference to Tokyo 2020 Olympics) in over six hours and 35 minutes.

(With inputs from agencies)