Table tennis is fun to learn but takes practice to master. In the past, you needed a training partner to work on your game. Nowadays, there are many ping pong robots that can return the ball and help you practice various shots. This high speed table tennis robot comes with a model predictive controller that enables it to react to changes in the predicted ball trajectory.
This robot can hit balls with an average exit velocity of 24.6 mph. A robot arm with 5 degrees of freedom was used to pull this off. It is actuated by a Dynamixel, which takes care of orienting the paddle and wrist. The above video shows it in action. As you can see, this robot can hit spikes, top/back spin, and various other shots.
[Credit: David Nguyen, Kendrick D. Cancio, Sangbae Kim]
