AI Basketball Player Breaks all Records! Human Players Will Cease to Exist
A seven feet tall and 240-pound AI basketball player won hearts with a mind-blowing performance
A seven feet tall and 240-pound humanoid robot, named CUE, plays basketball and has biometrics similar to an average basketball player. At the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the hoop-shooting AI basketball player 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, head of the development team behind CUE and other Toyota humanoid robot projects, told CNN.
At the Olympic Games in Tokyo, in the Summer of 2021, this new AI basketball player wowed spectators with a nothing-but-net shot from half-court in the basketball event at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. CUE humanoid robot has the size of the most prominent basketball players around the world, but in Tokyo, successfully creating a world-record 2,000 consecutive shots for assisted robots, free throws and three-pointers proved to be an easy task for the AI-powered Basketball-playing robot. Currently, CNN revealed that its development team at Toyota is attempting to make it dribble and pass with similar perfection to its shooting prowess.
The feat at the Olympics was won by the CUE3, which has been using a censor in its chest in order to calculate the angle, height, and weight of a shot, required to make a shot from any position on the court. After finding shooting promise in the amateur project, CUE1, from the free throw line in 2017, Toyota put its resources behind it. The subsequent versions of the humanoid robot went into perfecting the version witnessed in Tokyo, quite literally a shooting machine, but moving one step further to carry “the same range of motion and flexibility as humans”, is a tall order said Tomohiro Nomi, the leader of the CUE humanoid robot’s development team.
The robot’s current version, the CUE5, has been reviewed as far more advanced.
This Basketball-playing robot has sensors and cameras that can map its position on court, and with the latest, advanced movement in its hands, it can also calculate the distance between its hands and the ball, allowing it to dribble.
“We would like to try shooting from even further distances in the future – for example, from the 3-point line on the opposite court or from the free-throw line,” Nomi mentioned.
He further added that the advancements seen in the CUE will be relevant across the robotics field, not just for basketball, and that innovation that will permit robots to exactly mimic human movements is not too far either.
