Robots have been beating us in games like Chess and Go for quite some time now. Physical sports are a bit more challenging as they require intelligence and agility. Robots are already capable of playing basketball and volleyball but tennis is even more complex. Researchers have now trained a robot that can engage in multi-shot rallies with human players. It can hit balls at speeds 15 m/s. LATENT is a system that learns athletic humanoid tennis skills based on imperfect human motion data. As the researchers explain:
“data consist only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches”
The paper is on arxiv now: https://t.co/aNh4lizAsQ.
We gratefully acknowledge the support from @GalbotRobotics. https://t.co/uxXpDFko36
— Zhikai Zhang (@Zhikai273) March 16, 2026
With proper training, it is possible to come up with a humanoid policy that enables robots to strike incoming balls under various conditions and hit specific targets. As you can see in the above video, the robot features reactive footwork.
[HT]
