Monday, September 09, 2024

On Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

In case you want to learn how to do that! Nice milestone by Google Deepmind!

From the 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 this https URL"

[2408.03906] Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis




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