Watch Sony’s elite ping pong robot take on highly ranked players

Humans have been building ping-pong-playing robots for decades, like Omron’s FORPHEUS robot Challenge amateur competitors At CES 2017. What sets Ace apart from the rest is that the robot was… Developed by Sony’s Artificial Intelligence Departmentis the first to be able to withstand, and sometimes even defeat, highly ranked human players in matches that follow the official rules of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF).

AI is already capable of outperforming humans in games like Chess and He goesBut physical games pose a much greater challenge as robots must be designed to match the speed and responsiveness of the human mind and body. To be able to compete in table tennis, a particularly difficult game where the ball moves at high speed and spins in ways that can change its trajectory, Sony researchers developed an eight-jointed robotic system. Two joints control the position of the paddle, two of them adjust its overall direction, while the other three joints enable the robot to deliver powerful strokes.

The Ace’s moving parts are aided by a complex vision system consisting of nine conventional cameras surrounding the court that can determine the position of the ball in 3D space, and three “gaze control systems” that measure the ball’s angular velocity and spin so its trajectory can be accurately calculated.

In a study that explains the capabilities and achievements of ACE published in the magazine, nature, Today, Sony says that during test matches in April 2025, the robot won three out of five matches against elite players (athletes with more than 10 years of training) and lost two matches against professional players who regularly compete in professional leagues. Sony says Ace continued to defeat professional players in December 2025 and last month, according to Reuters.