There is a robot sinking basketballs at the Tokyo Olympics. It’s wild. The Future Of Sports?
There’s A Robot Sinking Basketballs At The Tokyo Olympics. Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. The advance of technology is based on making it fit in to not really notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.
Tokyo Olympics is making buzz.
Robot sinking basketball.
The Tokyo Olympics remain at full speed, as any individual who can establish the TELEVISION network to NBC is no question conscious. And also, while the biennial face-off between first-rate professional athletes as well as the countries they stand for is completely a party of human quality, in 2021, at the very least, one robotic is being enabled to have a little enjoyable, as a reward.
Fresh from the Tokyo Olympics Twitter account, we have this clip of a tiny-headed robotic– WHY IS ITS HEAD SO SMALL, Mashable’s EiC asked in Slack– capturing, as well as sinking, cost-free tosses Check out this crazy rubbish.
Nothing but net! (The robot moved further back right after this and immediately sunk a three-point shot with ease as well.)
Besides that news, reporter Ann Killion captured the real headline-grabber … and that would be this hunk of metal slowly and inartfully sinking shots from a fair distance — including one basket it made from half-court!
Sure enough, that ball goes through as well. Obviously, the robot can get buckets, and even though it’s slow to the draw … it’s clearly quite accurate. Shoot, maybe Team USA shoulda recruited this thing to be one of their wingmen! They sure needed the help.
All jokes aside, the fact this robot can actually make its way up and down the floor and put up shots on its own is pretty incredible. It’s a testament to technology but also perhaps a sign of what may come in the future. Who’s to say they won’t make a full-blown team of robots one day???
Considering what Boston Dynamics is doing with their robots and how far they’ve come in making them move seamlessly, like humans, something tells us that possibility could come about. We certainly have the tech to do it — but do we actually wanna???
Dancing and basketball AI is cool and all to watch … and yet, things can go left fast. So be careful what you wish for, humanity!!! We’ve seen the movies — we’re not too far from that.
The Bottom Line
Why is this robot wearing a jersey with the number 95 on it? I don’t know enough about basketball to have a good answer for you there. But I do know robots, and this almost seven-foot-tall future Robolympics (not actually a thing) superstar has the goods.
Read Monkey is playing a ping-pong game
Kidding aside, this basketball-slinging robot appears to be CUE, a Toyota-developed creation that was first built — the original model, anyway — in 2018. In 2019, the third version, CUE3, went out to set a Guinness world record. It’s not clear if the one attending the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo is the same model or a newer one, but it appears to be from the same line of perfect-shooting automatons. You can read more about the CUE project here.
Still, you can play basketball, don’t worry about that, technology is just enhancing the experience of the game.
The odd moment you see above played out as part of the halftime festivities during Sunday’s showdown between Team USA and France. France ultimately won the match-up, 89 to 79.
