_version_ 1866909597865869312
author D'Ambrosio, David B.
Abeyruwan, Saminda
Graesser, Laura
Iscen, Atil
Amor, Heni Ben
Bewley, Alex
Reed, Barney J.
Reymann, Krista
Takayama, Leila
Tassa, Yuval
Choromanski, Krzysztof
Coumans, Erwin
Jain, Deepali
Jaitly, Navdeep
Jaques, Natasha
Kataoka, Satoshi
Kuang, Yuheng
Lazic, Nevena
Mahjourian, Reza
Moore, Sherry
Oslund, Kenneth
Shankar, Anish
Sindhwani, Vikas
Vanhoucke, Vincent
Vesom, Grace
Xu, Peng
Sanketi, Pannag R.
author_facet D'Ambrosio, David B.
Abeyruwan, Saminda
Graesser, Laura
Iscen, Atil
Amor, Heni Ben
Bewley, Alex
Reed, Barney J.
Reymann, Krista
Takayama, Leila
Tassa, Yuval
Choromanski, Krzysztof
Coumans, Erwin
Jain, Deepali
Jaitly, Navdeep
Jaques, Natasha
Kataoka, Satoshi
Kuang, Yuheng
Lazic, Nevena
Mahjourian, Reza
Moore, Sherry
Oslund, Kenneth
Shankar, Anish
Sindhwani, Vikas
Vanhoucke, Vincent
Vesom, Grace
Xu, Peng
Sanketi, Pannag R.
contents 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
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_03906
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis
D'Ambrosio, David B.
Abeyruwan, Saminda
Graesser, Laura
Iscen, Atil
Amor, Heni Ben
Bewley, Alex
Reed, Barney J.
Reymann, Krista
Takayama, Leila
Tassa, Yuval
Choromanski, Krzysztof
Coumans, Erwin
Jain, Deepali
Jaitly, Navdeep
Jaques, Natasha
Kataoka, Satoshi
Kuang, Yuheng
Lazic, Nevena
Mahjourian, Reza
Moore, Sherry
Oslund, Kenneth
Shankar, Anish
Sindhwani, Vikas
Vanhoucke, Vincent
Vesom, Grace
Xu, Peng
Sanketi, Pannag R.
Robotics
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
title Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03906