Watch a sparkly basketball robot built by Toyota engineers sink flawless free throws


It’s a tale as old as time. Inspired by a famous manga about basketball, a group of engineers from Toyota worked together in their free hours to build a robot capable of shooting perfect free throws. Eventually, after perfecting their mechanical creation, they challenged professional human players and beat them shot for shot.

That’s the story reported by Japanese news agency Asahi Shimbun anyway, and the video evidence (above and below) certainly bears it out. Although, exactly what technology is powering this free throw-shooting bot is unclear. Asahi Shimbun says AI was used to teach the robot how to shoot, but the video evidence makes the bot look pretty unsophisticated. It moves about on wheels and just repeats the same motions again...

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via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2pfCrWM"

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