The public in Japan has just learned about a new version of Toyota's humanoid basketball-playing robot, the model called Q7 appeared in front of thousands of people in Tokyo during halftime of an official game of the Japanese Basketball League and showed that sports robotics is entering another level. The robot advanced through the center of the court and made a free throw in front of the fans, then moved to the sideline and attempted a three-point shot, the shot hit the rim and went out, but still drew intense applause from the audience present.

It may seem like just entertainment, but behind the scenes there is an important technological leap; the project began in 2017 with a voluntary initiative by Toyota employees. Previous versions could already throw with good precision, but many movements still depended on manually programmed commands, now the Q7 uses reinforcement learning, a form of artificial intelligence in which the machine improves by repeating movements thousands of times in a virtual environment.

It is the same concept used in advanced systems that learn by playing chess, video games or simulating complex tasks. In the case of robots this means progressively learning balance, movement, dribbling and motor coordination. Another important change is in the physical design, previous models had two wheels on each foot and could easily lose this ability if one of them left the ground, the robot now uses one wheel per foot with a more efficient dynamic balance system, this reduces falls and improves rapid movements.

The robot not only throws better, it moves better, according to Toyota engineers, the objective goes beyond sports, projects like this help develop fine motor control, spatial perception, decision making and coordination between hardware and artificial intelligence, all of this can be applied in the future in factories, logistics, personal assistance and service theft.

The symbolic detail also draws attention, while many believe that only China and the United States lead the new robotics race, Japan demonstrates that it is still extremely relevant and does so in an intelligent way, transforming heavy research into public spectacle, but the presentations on the field are only the surface, because behind the scenes a much greater transformation is silently occurring. China is expanding its thefts throughout the world. figures attract attention.