Toyota debuted its most advanced AI-powered humanoid robot, the CUE7, at Toyota Arena Tokyo, where it stood up, dribbled, and sank a free throw without human input in front of around 8,400 fans. The CUE series began in 2017 as a voluntary employee side project before becoming an official research program. Previous models set records: the CUE3 earned a Guinness World Record in 2019 for most consecutive basketball free throws by a humanoid robot (assisted), sinking 2,020 in a row, and the CUE6 earned the record for the farthest basketball shot by a robot, connecting from about 80 feet 6 inches away. For the CUE7, Toyota's team discarded everything they had built and started over, using reinforcement learning powered by AI instead of the earlier model predictive control. "We made full use of AI, and we discarded everything we had built up and started again from scratch," said Tomohiro Nomi, research leader for humanoid robots at Toyota's Frontier Research Center. The hybrid control system merges reinforcement learning with model predictive control, enabling the robot to adapt to unexpected situations.