High Speed Robotic Table Tennis Swinging Using Lightweight Hardware with Model Predictive Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nguyen, David, Cancio, Kendrick D., Kim, Sangbae
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nguyen, David
Cancio, Kendrick D.
Kim, Sangbae
author_facet Nguyen, David
Cancio, Kendrick D.
Kim, Sangbae
contents We present a robotic table tennis platform that achieves a variety of hit styles and ball-spins with high precision, power, and consistency. This is enabled by a custom lightweight, high-torque, low rotor inertia, five degree-of-freedom arm capable of high acceleration. To generate swing trajectories, we formulate an optimal control problem (OCP) that constrains the state of the paddle at the time of the strike. The terminal position is given by a predicted ball trajectory, and the terminal orientation and velocity of the paddle are chosen to match various possible styles of hits: loops (topspin), drives (flat), and chops (backspin). Finally, we construct a fixed-horizon model predictive controller (MPC) around this OCP to allow the hardware to quickly react to changes in the predicted ball trajectory. We validate on hardware that the system is capable of hitting balls with an average exit velocity of 11 m/s at an 88% success rate across the three swing types.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01617
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle High Speed Robotic Table Tennis Swinging Using Lightweight Hardware with Model Predictive Control
Nguyen, David
Cancio, Kendrick D.
Kim, Sangbae
Robotics
Systems and Control
We present a robotic table tennis platform that achieves a variety of hit styles and ball-spins with high precision, power, and consistency. This is enabled by a custom lightweight, high-torque, low rotor inertia, five degree-of-freedom arm capable of high acceleration. To generate swing trajectories, we formulate an optimal control problem (OCP) that constrains the state of the paddle at the time of the strike. The terminal position is given by a predicted ball trajectory, and the terminal orientation and velocity of the paddle are chosen to match various possible styles of hits: loops (topspin), drives (flat), and chops (backspin). Finally, we construct a fixed-horizon model predictive controller (MPC) around this OCP to allow the hardware to quickly react to changes in the predicted ball trajectory. We validate on hardware that the system is capable of hitting balls with an average exit velocity of 11 m/s at an 88% success rate across the three swing types.
title High Speed Robotic Table Tennis Swinging Using Lightweight Hardware with Model Predictive Control
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01617