80 Feet, Nothing But Net: The New World Record for Robotic Basketball

It sounds like a scene out of a sci-fi movie, but it actually happened on a quiet court in Nagakute, Japan. A robot named CUE6 stood at one end of the floor, looked at a hoop 80 feet away, and let it fly. When the ball snapped through the net, it didn't just break a world record; it kind of made everyone in the room rethink what "precision" actually looks like.

Guinness World Records recently made it official: Toyota’s CUE6 now holds the title for the farthest basketball shot ever made by a humanoid. We’re talking 24.55 meters. To put that in perspective, that’s almost the entire length of a professional court. It’s the kind of range that would make even Stephen Curry do a double-take.

What’s really wild about this isn't just the distance, though. It’s the fact that CUE6 actually missed its very first shot of the day. It hit the rim and bounced away, just like any human might. But that’s where the "AI" part gets interesting. Instead of getting frustrated or needing a team of engineers to jump in and fix the code, the robot just… learned. It analyzed why it missed, adjusted its internal calculations for things like motor torque and release angle, and nailed it on the second try.

The engineers at Toyota’s Frontier Research Center have been at this for a while. This project actually started as a side hobby for a few employees back in 2017 using Legos. Fast forward a few years, and they’ve built a machine that uses something called Parallel Elastic Actuators—basically mechanical muscles that store up energy like a spring so it can launch a ball with enough power to cross a stadium.

We often think of robots as stiff or "pre-programmed," but CUE6 is doing something different. It’s using reinforcement learning to figure out its own throwing style. It doesn't throw like a human because it doesn't have human joints; it found a way to shoot that works specifically for its own metal frame.

It’s easy to look at this and say, "Okay, cool, a robot that plays basketball. So what?" But the real story is what happens next. If a robot can teach itself to sink a basket from 80 feet by learning from its own mistakes, imagine what that means for robots working in disaster zones or doing delicate surgeries.

The project lead, Tomohiro Nomi, says they aren't done yet. Now that they’ve conquered the full-court shot, they want to get the robot running and, eventually, dunking like Michael Jordan. For now, though, CUE6 is happy being the best long-range shooter on the planet—even if it doesn't have a shoe deal yet.