Ace! Motion Planning of Professional-Level Table Tennis Serves with a Robot Arm

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06989v1
• Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:23:30 GMT
• Title: Ace! Motion Planning of Professional-Level Table Tennis Serves with a Robot Arm
• Abstract summary: We present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization.<n>In this work, we present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization.
• Score: 0.6321579695752056
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Table tennis, a dynamic, compact, and popular sport, has received significant attention as a robotics benchmark over the last decades. Most of the research has focused on the rally aspect - returning an incoming ball - requiring high-speed vision, agile motion planning, and tight closed-loop control. However, the other component of table tennis gameplay - the serve - is comparatively a quite unexplored research problem, that in fact requires pushing physics modeling and control to the extremes. Achieving competitive serves with a robot presents domain-specific challenges, such as high-spin generation from a spinless ball, precise aiming, or multi-objective optimization. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization. Serves generated in this way offer a wide and controllable variation of spins of up to 550 rad/s, and speeds of up to 6.7 m/s, matching and even surpassing those of elite table tennis players.

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