Inspired by the iconic manga Slam Dunk, the engineers at Toyota got together and decided to build a free throw-shooting robot in their spare time.
First reported by Japanese news outlet Asahi Shimbun, then relayed in English by The Verge, the bot was built and taught to shoot hoops using AI. From the video shown, it seems that free-throwing was the main skill the engineers wanted the robot to learn, but it definitely pays off. The robot nails every single attempted free throw on the court.
To test out its skills, they called in some players from local B-league Basketball team Alvark Tokyo. Two of their players went up against the robot in a free throw contest, where they miss twice while the robot wins by getting in every throw. To be fair, the bot stayed in the same place during all its attempts and repeated the same motions. Fingers crossed those engineers start working on dunking robot.
