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Ace Robot Performance vs Human Opponents
Win rate analysis of the Ace robotic arm against amateur and professional players.
Primary Sources
Meet 'Ace,' the paddle-wielding robot who just beat humans at ping pong ...
A paddle-wielding robot is so adept at playing table tennis that it is posing a tough challenge to elite human players and sometimes defeating them, according to a new study that shows how advances in artificial intelligence are making robots more agile. Japanese electronics giant Sony built the robotic arm it calls Ace and pitted it against professional athletes. Ace proved a worthy adversary, though one with some non-human attributes: nine camera eyes positioned around the court and an uncanny ability to follow the ball’s logo to measure its spin. The robot learned how to play the sport using the AI method known as reinforcement learning. “There’s no way to program a robot by hand to play table tennis. You have to learn how to play from experience,” said Sony AI researcher Peter Dürr, co-author of the study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature. To conduct the experiments, Sony built an Olympic-sized table tennis court at its headquarters in Tokyo to give professional and other highly skilled athletes a “level playing field” with the robot, Dürr said in an interview with The Associated Press. Some of the athletes said they were surprised by Ace’s prowess. Sony calls it a first for a common competitive sport Sony says it is the “first time a robot has achieved human, expert-level play in a commonly played competitive sport in the physical world — a longstanding milestone for AI and robotics research.” The custom-built robot has eight joints that direct its movements, or degrees of freedom, enabling it to position the racket, execute shots and swiftly respond to its opponent’s rallies. “Speed is really one of the fundamental issues in robotics today, especially in scenarios or environments that are not fixed,” said Michael Spranger, president of Sony AI, in an interview. “We see a lot of robots that are in factories that are very, very fast,” Spranger said. “But they’re doing the same trajectory over and over again. With this technology, we show that it’s actually possible to train robots to be very adaptive and competitive and fast in uncertain environments that constantly change.” Spranger said such technology could play a role in manufacturing and other industries. It’s also not hard to imagine how such high-speed and highly perceptive hardware could be used in war. Building parity with humans is a challenge A humanoid robot ran faster than the human world record in a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday, but gettin...
AI ping pong robot beats top human players, but don't freak out yet
If you're primed to fear AI-driven robots replacing human workers at complex physical tasks, consider this your trigger warning. A robot arm built by Sony, and named Ace, has just been dubbed "the first autonomous system to be competitive with elite human table tennis players." That's a quote from the study splashed across the front page of Nature, the world's most venerable peer-reviewed science journal. The Ace researchers brought receipts. As you can see in the video above, the eight-jointed robot arm is able to make split-second decisions via an AI that's being fed real-time data from nine cameras. It scored a lot of points and won a few games against some of the world's top ping-pong players at Sony HQ in Tokyo. But here's the good news buried in all the data. Yes, within the confines of this study, Ace was competitive. That doesn't mean Ace could figure out how to win every time; it's nothing like the half marathon-running robot that simply has to master one speed. And, crucially, the human players started to spot flaws in Ace's ping-pong strategy. Ace isn't the first ping-pong playing robot. Researchers have long been interested in the sport because of its speed and real-time decision-making, which is a major frontier in robotics. In this respect, Ace marks a milestone for the AI system and for the highly reliable arm. That arm was able to track a ping pong ball with 10 milliseconds of latency — more than 10 times faster than the human brain can manage. Mashable Light Speed "Ace’s striking skills are trained entirely in simulation using reinforcement learning, then transferred directly to the real robot," Sony explained in a blog post. "This is analogous to a player who practices endlessly in a virtual training hall and then walks onto a real court without needing to relearn anything."The human players fight backBut that's just the thing — ping-pong players learn on the go, and they're looking at more than just the ball. Mayuka Taira, who lost a match to Ace last December, told Sony the robot effectively intimidated her at first. "Because you can't read its reactions, it's impossible to sense what kind of shots it dislikes or struggles with, and that makes it even more difficult to play against," she said. But then Rui Takenaka, who has both lost and won against Ace, went that crucial human step further. Here's what he told the company, emphasis ours:If I used a serve with complex spin, Ace also returned the ball with complex spin, which made it d...
'It totally blew my mind': Sony's Project Ace robot plays ping pong ...
Sony AI's Project Ace is the first robot to beat multiple elite-level table tennis players in an International Table Tennis Federation-style arena and under the watchful eyes of licensed referees.
Sony AI's Project Ace autonomous robot becomes first to beat pro table ...
Sony AI's Project Ace autonomous robot becomes first to beat pro table tennis players The robot's ability to track spin and react within milliseconds highlights a new era of real-world AI ...
