Project Ace, autonomous table tennis system, Sony Corporation, Minato, Tokyo, Japan

[Administrator]

Developer - Sony Corporation

ace.ai.sony

Peter Dürr

 

[Administrator]

Project Ace

Apr 22, 2026

Sony AI's research project, Ace, is the first AI system to compete with and beat elite table tennis players under official rules. This short film follows the research team behind the project—from the earliest experiments in 2020 to the moment Ace defeated a professional player in a live match.

The film covers the three core innovations that made Ace possible: a perception system capable of measuring spin on an unaltered ball in real time, a reinforcement learning architecture trained entirely in simulation and transferred to the physical world, and a custom-built robotic arm optimized for high-speed, repeated impact.

Ace's research is published in Nature. To read the paper and explore supplementary materials, visit ace.ai.sony.

 

[Administrator]

This robot can beat you at table tennis

Apr 22, 2026

For the first time, an AI-powered machine has bested elite-level athletes at a physical sport. 'Ace' is a table tennis-playing robot. It can calculate the position of a ball in space, measure its spin while it's flying over the table at 30mph and react in a tenth of the time a human player would need. Designing and training this system was no easy task...
00:00 "I'm not very good at table tennis"
00:39 Meet 'Ace'
01:09 The challenges of the sport
02:11 The history of AI vs games
04:00 Machine learning through trial and error
05:26 Systems for measuring high-speed spin
08:09 Speed, reach and reaction times
09:35 Testing the robot: The game is on!
11:09 "I really wanted our robot to win"
12:34 The potential of AI systems in the real world

Read the paper:
"Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot"

April 22, 2026