Last updated: 2026-04-26
CUE started in 2017 as a volunteer activity inside the Toyota Engineering Society, a group within Toyota that runs engineer-led projects outside formal product programmes. The initial team was nine people. None of them had a robotics background. The stated ambition was modest: build a machine that could shoot free throws reliably.
Team members have described the project's anchor in public interviews — a line from the manga Slam Dunk in which a character is told to take 20,000 practice shots. The figure became an informal yardstick. Working in free time and using LEGO for the earliest test rigs, the team built a first real prototype (CUE1) in 2018 that reached roughly nine-of-ten on free throws in internal tests.
The second generation, CUE2, increased motor power and let the robot stand up under its own weight in late 2018. The leap from a bench-mounted shooter to a standing humanoid changed the project's profile inside Toyota and opened the door to public demonstrations.
CUE3 arrived in April 2019 and was the first generation to appear on a Guinness leaderboard: 2,020 consecutive free throws over 6 hours and 35 minutes. The total is listed as "assisted" because a separate ball-feed mechanism handed CUE3 the ball, but every throw was made by the robot itself, with its own camera-driven aim adjustment.
Later in 2019, CUE4 introduced two changes. It could move around the court on skate-style wheels rather than standing in one spot, and it could grasp and release the ball autonomously. That combination was enough for B.League club Alvark Tokyo to formally register CUE4 as a shooting guard under jersey number 94.
The registration was mostly a mascot arrangement — CUE4 does not play full games — but it is a legitimate line on the B.League roster. It gave the project a fixed public identity and a recurring venue for its demos. Half-time and All-Star appearances followed over the next several seasons.
CUE5 added dribbling in 2021 and appeared during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic basketball match between the United States and France (the Games ran in 2021 after the pandemic delay). The Olympic slot was CUE's largest international broadcast audience up to that point.
CUE6 debuted at the half-time of an Alvark Tokyo vs. Shiga Lakes game on 24 December 2022 and shifted the project's focus toward long-range shooting. The team re-engineered the right arm for more throwing power, added foot-mounted cameras to track ball position, and routed roughly 350 internal wires to support the new motion.
On 26 September 2024 in Nagakute, Aichi, CUE6 sank a basket from 24.55 m — roughly the length of a FIBA regulation court. Guinness recognised the shot as the farthest basketball shot by a humanoid robot. It was the team's second world record and pushed CUE beyond the free-throw novelty that had defined its earlier generations.
CUE7 was unveiled in April 2026. The generation jump is mostly about locomotion and control, not about shooting range. Weight drops from around 120 kg on CUE6 to 74 kg. The fixed shooting stance is replaced by an inverted two-wheel balancing base. The control stack pairs reinforcement learning with model predictive control, so CUE7 can plan and execute a shot while its own base is still stabilising, rather than locking into a static pose first.
The shift reflects where humanoid research is moving more broadly in 2026: toward integrated perception, planning and actuation, with learned components handling the fuzzy parts and model-based control handling the physical guarantees. CUE7 is Toyota's attempt to stay close to that frontier while keeping a narrow, measurable task (put the ball in the basket) as its benchmark.
CUE is not a commercial product and Toyota has not signalled any intent to make it one. Its value is easier to read in two other ways. First, as a research platform: every generation forces the team to re-solve perception, actuation and control for a task with a clean success metric. Second, as an engineering culture exercise: a volunteer group with no robotics background has, across nine years, delivered seven iterations and two Guinness records inside one of the world's largest carmakers.
For context, CUE sits alongside Honda's ASIMO (retired in 2022) in the small group of famous Japanese humanoid projects. Where ASIMO was a full-body general-purpose biped run by a dedicated Honda programme, CUE is narrower, more specific, and run in part by volunteers. The two represent different answers to the same question — what should a large Japanese car company build in humanoid robotics? — and both have helped set public expectations of what robots can and cannot do.
The next obvious milestone is the human distance record: 34.60 m, set by Joshua Walker in July 2022. Toyota has publicly framed that figure as the target to beat. Whether CUE7 or a later generation gets there is unresolved at the time of writing.
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