Ace! Motion Planning of Professional-Level Table Tennis Serves with a Robot Arm

Title:Ace! Motion Planning of Professional-Level Table Tennis Serves with a Robot Arm

Abstract:Table tennis, a dynamic, compact, and popular sport, has received significant attention as a robotics benchmark over the last decades. Most of the research has focused on the rally aspect - returning an incoming ball - requiring high-speed vision, agile motion planning, and tight closed-loop control. However, the other component of table tennis gameplay - the serve - is comparatively a quite unexplored research problem, that in fact requires pushing physics modeling and control to the extremes. Achieving competitive serves with a robot presents domain-specific challenges, such as high-spin generation from a spinless ball, precise aiming, or multi-objective optimization. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization. Serves generated in this way offer a wide and controllable variation of spins of up to 550 rad/s, and speeds of up to 6.7 m/s, matching and even surpassing those of elite table tennis players.

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2607.06989 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.06989v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.06989 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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