No, Toyota did not sign an NBA player. It built one.
The company has introduced CUE7, its latest basketball-shooting robot, designed to make precise shots through a mix of AI, vision, and motion control. First reported by Interesting Engineering, CUE7 is built to do more than roll out for a flashy trick shot.
Toyota says the new model is lighter, quicker, and built for more precise movement on court.
Aim, adjust, release, repeat
At Toyota Arena Tokyo, the humanoid robot runs through a highly deliberate shooting routine. CUE7 locks onto the hoop, uses sensors to gauge distance, then makes small upper-body adjustments to its arm angle and posture before lifting the ball into a fixed shooting position and releasing it with carefully controlled force and angle.
The shot rises on a high arc and often drops with barely a brush of the rim. Then the robot resets and runs through the same sequence again with near-identical precision, giving the performance the rhythm of a practiced shooter.
Why Toyota put a robot on the court
CUE7 is not just there to put on a basketball demo. It is part of Toyota’s broader robotics work in vision, sensing, planning, motion control, and embodied AI, with the court serving as a practical setting to test how those systems perform on a single tightly controlled task.
Basketball gives the company something that is easy to watch but difficult to pull off. To make the shot, the robot has to identify the target, judge distance, calculate trajectory, coordinate its movement, and control force with consistency.
More than a fresh coat of paint
Toyota says this version was substantially reworked, starting with the body itself.
On X, Toyota Frontier Research Center said CUE7 was cut from 120 kilograms to 74 kilograms, a major drop that makes it a much lighter build than the previous model.
The company added that the humanoid now uses an inverted two-wheel structure and a hybrid control system that combines reinforcement learning with model predictive control. That AI-based setup is meant to support more dynamic movement, giving the robot an agile setup on court.
Built on a record-setting run
CUE7 also comes from a robot line that had already been stacking visible milestones before this latest debut. The earlier CUE6 improved ball tracking and control through redesigned hands and foot-mounted cameras, helping push the project further into long-range shooting.
In December 2024, CUE secured its second Guinness World Records title for the farthest basketball shot by a humanoid robot, with a distance of 24.55 meters. CUE7 is the newest chapter in a basketball robot series that had already made history.
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