[HN Gopher] Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperf...
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Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human
motion data
Author : danielmorozoff
Score : 106 points
Date : 2026-03-15 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zzk273.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (zzk273.github.io)
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| Nothing constructive to say, besides that the video really shows
| we're entering into a Sci-fi era.
| Void_ wrote:
| This just makes me want to play tennis right now. Such an
| addictive sports.
| Aboutplants wrote:
| Really impressive. In a few years there will be robotic AI
| instructors for the wealthy and their kids
| squibonpig wrote:
| Maybe for novelty, but the rich usually just pay humans to act
| like robots.
| nradov wrote:
| Ironically something like this could eventually make elite
| level tennis training cheaper and more accessible. Families of
| some top US juniors already spend $100k per year, much of that
| on 1:1 coaching. Some fraction could eventually be automated,
| at least for repetitive basic skills practice. Like the next
| level of a tennis ball machine.
| ordu wrote:
| It is interesting to watch. The movements of the robot are robot-
| like. I mean, wtf, there were no robot playing tennis before, but
| I have an idea how a robot playing tennis would be like, and this
| video confirms my expectations. Sharp, unsure movements, a lot of
| hesitation, ...
|
| Movies pictured robots like this long before this become
| possible, but how did producers guessed it?
|
| Or maybe movies rendered different kinds of robots, but this
| video bring into my memory only those, that look like this. A
| kind of confirmation bias?
| thethirdone wrote:
| I agree that the movements look quite robotic (though not as
| much as you might expect), but I don't think any movies have
| depicted robots moving like that. A much more common depiction
| is moving only a single joint at a time.
|
| > Sharp, unsure movements, a lot of hesitation, ...
|
| I like these particular descriptors. Another I would add is
| holding poses unnaturally still. While waiting for the ball,
| the robot holds its racket extremely consistently relative to
| its body even while sharply turning.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Why can some Temu humanoid robot do this sort of impressive,
| coordinated, high-speed thing, but Tesla Optimus completely sucks
| at everything unless they're moving at 0.02m/s (and even then
| they're not great)? Like, train this thing on the latent space of
| folding my clothes out of the dryer and I will send you my money.
| 10xDev wrote:
| Relax, it is one demo. It probably can't handle the millions of
| edge cases that exist in real life.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| I'd be OK (and from a product perspective think it would be a
| win) if Optimus just mastered one high-value skill like
| clothes folding. Yet, here we are.
| blueblisters wrote:
| Very impressive. But it doesn't solve the whole problem yet.
|
| The robot and ball pose is estimated by high speed mocap cameras,
| and is fed to the policy.
|
| I imagine estimating that with onboard cameras - how humans do it
| - is much harder.
|
| Almost all of closed loop robotics is a state estimation problem.
| Control is "solved" if you can estimate state well enough.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| We know. Just appreciate it for what it is. Which is...awesome.
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| Impressive! Looks like a nice alternative or evolutionary step
| for a ball machine. Either way, teach it to serve :)
| V__ wrote:
| This is so interesting. Especially since it's kinda weird to
| train a robot to mimicking human play. I wonder what a perfect
| robot what actually behave like.
|
| It wouldn't need to split-step to activate muscles, the footwork
| would probably be minimal. I imagine a lot of different unusual
| looking swings to confuse human players, while still making
| perfect contact. It could make really late drop shots or even
| rotate the racket at the last moment for crazy angles.
|
| Would love to watch this.
| kadoban wrote:
| > I wonder what a perfect robot what actually behave like.
|
| Really depends what its hardware is. One with hardware a lot
| like a human would behave like a human.
|
| Since you didn't specify, I'm going to go with a robot that
| looks like a giant pong paddle.
| ilaksh wrote:
| We have just started ramping up practical use of imitation
| learning from human demonstrations in humanoids. A bigger
| development is that one or two projects are working on training
| foundational vision action language models based on large video
| datasets.
|
| I think before the end of summer general purpose physical
| knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one
| or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.
|
| Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.
|
| I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where
| you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029
| it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term
| rental.
|
| Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic
| tasks?
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| omg Elon Musk posts here! Are we also going to get full self
| driving, no interventions from NYC to LA within this timeframe,
| sir???
| mplappert wrote:
| That seems like quite an extrapolation and an extraordinary
| statement. This is a single task, in a lab setting. What your
| describing are extremely open-ended tasks in people's homes.
|
| What is informing these timelines?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Look at recent developments/announcements involving novel
| increasingly generalizable learning capabilities from
| projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open
| published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-
| Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0
|
| Figure 03:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w
|
| 1X Neo:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk
|
| Skild AI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by
| Watching Human Videos)
| nmaley wrote:
| " Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do
| domestic tasks?" The answer is yes. Steve Wozniak proposed the
| Coffee Test. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MowergwQR5Y
|
| It's actually very clever. Despite the apparent simplicity, no
| current model could pass it.
|
| Re your forecasts, I think they are optimistic in terms of
| timing but not ridiculously so.
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