Sony Ace Robot Defeats Elite Table Tennis Players - 20ms Latency and 9000 RPM Spin Tracking

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:01]Semi just published Project Ace in Nature and the headline is simple. A robot beat elite human players at table tennis in real matches.

[00:00:11]Project Ace is a fully autonomous pingpong system from Sony's AI research arm. Against five elite players, each with over a decade of experience and roughly 20 hours of weekly training, the robot won three of five matches. The technical edge is speed. Endtoend latency clocks in at 20.2 milliseconds compared to roughly 230 for an elite human. Three event-based vision sensors track the ball with submillisecond precision, registering spin above 9,000 revolutions per minute. Real world robotics continues to be the hard frontier for AI. And slowly but surely, we see the machines overtaking the humans one sport at a time.