Toyota CUE

Toyota's CUE is a basketball-shooting humanoid robot developed by a volunteer group inside the Toyota Engineering Society (TES). The project began in 2017 with nine engineers who had no prior robotics background and was inspired, according to the team, by a reference in the manga Slam Dunk to practising 20,000 free throws. The robot has been iterated through roughly one generation per year, from CUE1 in 2018 to CUE7 in April 2026.

The current model, CUE7, stands 218 cm tall and weighs 74 kg — a significant drop from CUE6's 120 kg. It swaps earlier fixed-stance designs for an inverted two-wheel base and runs a hybrid control stack that combines reinforcement learning with model predictive control. A vision system handles target detection and distance estimation, letting CUE7 calculate shot angles and force without being told its position on the court in advance.

Earlier generations set two Guinness World Records. In April 2019, CUE3 made 2,020 consecutive free throws over more than six hours. In September 2024, CUE6 hit a basket from 24.55 metres — the farthest basketball shot by a humanoid robot on record. CUE4 was formally registered as a shooting guard with B.League side Alvark Tokyo (jersey number 94) in 2019, and CUE5 added dribbling before performing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

CUE is not a commercial product. Toyota frames it as a long-running research platform for AI, actuation and perception, and the team uses public demonstrations — at B.League games, Toyota events and Guinness attempts — as both technical milestones and engineering-culture exercises. The human record for a long-distance shot, 34.60 m by Joshua Walker in July 2022, is the figure the CUE team publicly aims to beat.