Robots are already getting great at table tennis. In the future, they will improve on their own. Take DeepMind’s self improving table tennis robots for instance. It consists of a pair of robot arms that play table tennis against each other. When one learns a new way to attack, the other one adapts.
For the first step, a robot agent was trained using reinforcement learning in simulation to play cooperative rallies. It was fine-tuned for holding long rallies. The above video shows these robots in action.
[HT]