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Anish Shankar

4 accepted papers

2025

Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

ICRA 2025

Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur humanlevel performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that takes humans years to master. We contr

Cited by 43SourceScholar
2023

Robotic Table Tennis: A Case Study into a High Speed Learning System

RSS 2023poster

We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This system puts together a highly optimized perception subsystem, a…

2022

Learning High Speed Precision Table Tennis on a Physical Robot

IROS 2022poster

Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design, ensuring safe exploration, and hyperparameter tuning are ofte…

Cited by 16SourceScholar
2022

i-Sim2Real: Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Policies in Tight Human-Robot Interaction Loops

CoRL 2022oral

Sim-to-real transfer is a powerful paradigm for robotic reinforcement learning. The ability to train policies in simulation enables safe exploration and large-scale data collection quickly at low cost. However, prior works in sim-to-real transfer of robotic policies typically do not involve any huma…

Cited by 66SourceScholar