Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

David B D'Ambrosio, Saminda Wishwajith Abeyruwan, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, Heni Ben Amor, Alex Bewley, Barney Reed, Krista Reymann, Leila Takayama, Yuval Tassa, Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Erwin Coumans, Deepali Jain, Navdeep Jaitly, Natasha Jaques, Satoshi Kataoka, Yuheng Kuang, Nevena Lazic, Reza Mahjourian, Sherry Moore et al. (7 additional authors not shown)

Track: full paper

Keywords: Human-level, Robot Learning, Competitive Table Tennis

TL;DR: We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis against unseen human opponents.

Abstract: Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that requires humans years to master. We contribute (1) a hierarchical and modular policy architecture consisting of (i) low level controllers with their skill descriptors that model their capabilities and (ii) a high level controller that chooses the low level skills, (2) techniques for enabling zero-shot sim-to-real and curriculum building, including an iterative approach (train in sim, deploy in real), 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.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Presenter: ~Alex_Bewley1

Format: Yes, the presenting author will definitely attend in person because they are attending ICLR for other complementary reasons.

Funding: No, the presenting author of this submission does *not* fall under ICLR’s funding aims, or has sufficient alternate funding.

Submission Number: 75