AI Basketball Robot in Action
0CUE was originally developed by Toyota volunteers in their free time as an AI basketball-playing robot that scores 100 percent of its shots
The new CUE3 is scheduled to be unveiled on April 10, 2019, at the B.League match between Alvark Tokyo and Sunrockers Shibuya
In any case, it seems true that Toyota is developing a basketball playing robot―but why now? The automotive industry is said to be facing a once-in-a-century period of major upheaval―surely Toyota doesn't have time to be developing a basketball playing robot?! No doubt many people think the same. What significance has Toyota identified in developing a basketball playing robot? I intend to charge headlong into finding the answer.
Inspired by an in-house volunteer organization!?
At present, CUE is being developed by the AI Athlete Robot Development Group, Frontier Research Center. However, CUE has its roots in an event hosted by the Toyota Engineering Society, Toyota's oldest in-house volunteer organization. The theme of the event was "Absolute beginners take up the challenge of developing AI from scratch." AI, which stands for "Artificial Intelligence," refers to artificial systems that make decisions and carry out tasks using human-like intelligence; for this reason, AI has to "learn" in the same way as humans. The team members soon began studying AI, but they had no idea what or how much to study. When discussing how much to study, one of the team members uttered a phrase used by Hanamichi Sakuragi, the protagonist of the renowned basketball comic, SLAM DUNK: "Will 20,000 practice shots be enough?" This led to the following idea: "Wouldn't it be amazing if we developed a robot that could use AI to calculate the distance to the goal by itself, and sink 100 percent of its shots?" And this was the exact moment that development of CUE began.