Magdalena Skipper, Editor in Chief at Nature, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Meet Ace – quite likely the first real-world autonomous system competitive with elite human table tennis players. Created by Peter Durr and colleagues at Sony, it represents an important breakthrough in addressing the challenges of physical real-time interaction and it does so by combining a new, high-speed perception system that uses event-based vision sensors, a new control system based on model-free reinforcement learning, as well as state-of-the-art high-speed robot hardware.
The implications are far reaching, it is about so much more than a game of table tennis! This is about the future potential of physical AI agents performing complex, real-time interactive tasks, in the context of complex, rapid and precise human–robot interactions.
I had the privilege of seeing Ace in action and I have to say it was breathtaking! I now regret that I wasn’t brave enough to play Ace but then it would have been a super easy win for Ace.
If you go to the paper, you will be able to see links to our News and Views that puts this work in a broader context, hear it discussed on the Nature podcast and learn more about Ace and the challenge it has to rise to in this Nature video.
Title: Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot
Authors: Peter Dürr, Mireille El Gheche, Guilherme Jorge Maeda, Nobuhiko Mukai, Naoya Takahashi, Stefan Heusser, Hamdi Sahloul, Yamen Saraiji, Pavel Adodin, Yin Bi, Sam Blakeman, Christian Conti, Dunai Fuentes Hitos, Yunpu Hu, Farshad Khadivar, Raphaela Kreiser, Luz Martinez, Fabian Schilling, Ricardo Tapiador Morales, Guillem Torrente, Mario Ynocente Castro, Lison Abecassis, Alberto Giammarino, Yu-Ting Huang, Yannik Nagel, Andrea Scotti, Alexander Sigrist, Tiago Silva, Etienne Walther, Jengyan Wong, Bilan Yang, Asude Aydin, Divij Grover, Apurv Saha, Valentina Cavinato, Takekazu Kakinuma, Taishi Kunori, Valentin Monferrato, Stefan Richter, Stefanos Charalambous, Simon Guist, Mads Alber Kuhlmann-Jorgensen, Lorenzo Miele, Agis Politis, Mattia Scardecchia, Hiroaki Kitano, Peter Wurman, Peter Stone, Michael Spran
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