When Honda’s ASIMO died, he left a gap in our hearts formed like a four-foot-tall spacesuit-looking bipedal robotic. Now Toyota has tried to fill that gap with some jock ‘bot who performs basketball properly sufficient to win a Guinness World File, and I’m right here to say: We are able to inform you tried to swap out the goldfish, and we’re not falling for it.
Toyota’s basketbot, an almost seven-foot-tall shooter named CUE6, lacks ASIMO’s childlike surprise. This robotic is a grown grownup, able to grownup duties like throwing a basketball ok {that a} beer firm places you in a guide that you just paid them to be in. It’s simply not the identical.
Sure, a guide you paid them to be in. Guinness guide gross sales aren’t as profitable as they was, so the corporate now sells data, taking in five-figure sums to seek out data that people or teams might break, or just inventing new classes. There may be at this level no clear method to decide a real report from a bought one, making all of them a bit nugatory, and now Toyota is in the identical hallowed web pages as all kinds of world dictators. Yay!
Toyota’s robotic threw a basketball over 80 ft, which is admittedly greater than I might ever do. Extra attention-grabbing than that, although, is that the bot could make changes on the fly through the use of machine studying to slim in on a hoop. That’s a genuinely attention-grabbing feat, however one which doesn’t even seem on the Guinness report web page. It may throw a basketball ok to be within the guide you pay to be in, and I suppose that’s value celebrating. However it’ll by no means exchange ASIMO, that precocious little child of a robotic that I grew up alongside. The goldfish is useless, and the brand new one is not any substitute.