Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

TL;DR

This paper presents a robot agent capable of amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis, achieved through hierarchical policies, sim-to-real transfer techniques, and real-time opponent adaptation, marking a significant step in robotics.

Contribution

Introduces a hierarchical, modular policy architecture and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer methods for competitive robot table tennis.

Findings

Robot won 45% of matches against humans.

Robot defeated all beginner and intermediate players.

Achieved human-level performance in a physically demanding sport.

Abstract

Achieving human-level speed and performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics research community. This work takes a step towards that goal and presents the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport which requires human players to undergo years of training to achieve an advanced level of proficiency. In this paper, we contribute (1) a hierarchical and modular policy architecture consisting of (i) low level controllers with their detailed skill descriptors which model the agent's capabilities and help to bridge the sim-to-real gap and (ii) a high level controller that chooses the low level skills, (2) techniques for enabling zero-shot sim-to-real including an iterative approach to defining the task distribution that is grounded in the real-world and defines an automatic curriculum, 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 human-level performance. Videos of the matches can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/view/competitive-robot-table-tennis