SMASH: Mastering Scalable Whole-Body Skills for Humanoid Ping-Pong with Egocentric Vision
2026-04-01 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a humanoid robot system for playing table tennis that relies only on its own cameras and sensors, without needing external equipment. Their system controls the entire robot body in a coordinated way to perform various natural and precise hitting motions. They also use a model to create diverse striking movements, making the robot's hits more robust and effective over a larger area. Experiments show the robot can hit the ball repeatedly and accurately at high speeds, demonstrating improved perception and coordination for dynamic tasks.
humanoid robotegocentric perceptionwhole-body controltable tennisstrike motionsgenerative modelmotion priorsrobot perceptiondynamic interactionlow-latency sensing
Authors
Junli Ren, Yinghui Li, Kai Zhang, Penglin Fu, Haoran Jiang, Yixuan Pan, Guangjun Zeng, Tao Huang, Weizhong Guo, Peng Lu, Tianyu Li, Jingbo Wang, Li Chen, Hongyang Li, Ping Luo
Abstract
Existing humanoid table tennis systems remain limited by their reliance on external sensing and their inability to achieve agile whole-body coordination for precise task execution. These limitations stem from two core challenges: achieving low-latency and robust onboard egocentric perception under fast robot motion, and obtaining sufficiently diverse task-aligned strike motions for learning precise yet natural whole-body behaviors. In this work, we present \methodname, a modular system for agile humanoid table tennis that unifies scalable whole-body skill learning with onboard egocentric perception, eliminating the need for external cameras during deployment. Our work advances prior humanoid table-tennis systems in three key aspects. First, we achieve agile and precise ball interaction with tightly coordinated whole-body control, rather than relying on decoupled upper- and lower-body behaviors. This enables the system to exhibit diverse strike motions, including explosive whole-body smashes and low crouching shots. Second, by augmenting and diversifying strike motions with a generative model, our framework benefits from scalable motion priors and produces natural, robust striking behaviors across a wide workspace. Third, to the best of our knowledge, we demonstrate the first humanoid table-tennis system capable of consecutive strikes using onboard sensing alone, despite the challenges of low-latency perception, ego-motion-induced instability, and limited field of view. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate stable and precise ball exchanges under high-speed conditions, validating scalable, perception-driven whole-body skill learning for dynamic humanoid interaction tasks.