Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis
David B. D'Ambrosio, Saminda Abeyruwan, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, Heni Ben Amor, Alex Bewley, Barney J. Reed, Krista Reymann
Abstract
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 contribute (1) a hierarchical and modular policy architecture consisting of (i) low level controllers with their skill descriptors that model their capabilities and (ii) a high level controller that chooses the low level skills, (2) techniques for enabling zero-shot sim-to-real and curriculum building, including an iterative approach (train in sim, deploy in real), and (3) real time adaptation to unseen opponents. Policy performance was assessed through 29 robot vs. human matches of which the robot won 45 % (13/29). All humans were unseen players and their skill level varied from beginner to tournament level. Whilst the robot lost all matches vs. the most advanced players it won 100 % matches vs. beginners and 55 % matches vs. intermediate players, demonstrating solidly amateur humanlevel performance. Videos of the matches can be viewed here<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1.</sup>See sites https://google.com/view/competitive-robot-table-tennis.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2025_achievinghumanle,
title = {Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis},
author = {David B. D'Ambrosio and Saminda Abeyruwan and Laura Graesser and Atil Iscen and Heni Ben Amor and Alex Bewley and Barney J. Reed and Krista Reymann and Leila Takayama and Yuval Tassa and Krzysztof Choromanski and Erwin Coumans and Deepali Jain and Navdeep Jaitly and Natasha Jaques and Satoshi Kataoka and Yuheng Kuang and Nevena Lazic and Reza Mahjourian and Sherry Moore and Kenneth Oslund and Anish Shankar and Vikas Sindhwani and Vincent Vanhoucke and Grace Vesom and Peng Xu and Pannag R. Sanketi},
booktitle = {ICRA 2025},
year = {2025}
}