Sony AI's "Ace" robot outperforms humans in table-tennis (ping-pong)

Archive: https://archive.is/20260422165419/https://www.ft.com/content...

Paper at Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10338-5

Utterly fascinating to see how the Ace robot from Sony AI was built to play with and beat elite level ping-pong players.

Video here: https://youtu.be/EH8kZDc7OLk?si=YAnQi-lWE28QIkVA

A few things caught my eye:

- Perception system tracks ball's spin at over 150 revolutions/second

- Top speed of the ball can exceed 20-25 meters/second; (the table is only 2.7m long)

- Reaction time of the robot can be as short as 20 milliseconds, roughly 10x faster than elite athletes

- Event cameras used to detect the spin of the ball; regular cameras at 200Hz to detect the ball's trajectory in realtime (!)

- Robot trained in simulation-only first using RL techniques, then transfers learning to real world

Fascinating research!