The Omron booth

The continuous rally table tennis robot wins this year’s Grand Prix in the CEATEC Innovation Awards, “as Selected by US Journalists”. From robots that just do as they’re told, Omron has polished its sensing and control technology to develop a robot that can grasp human movement to offer new value and actions to match that movement. To this end, the company believed it was necessary to enable a machine to “think” for itself, and the continuous rally table tennis robot is the result of those technological advances.

The table tennis robot during a rally – height 2.7 m, weight 600 kg.

Developed with the aim of enabling table tennis rallies to continue for a long time between the robot and its opponent, the continuous rally table tennis robot returns the ping-pong ball to a position that is easy for its opponent to hit. To continue the rally, the robot itself needs to be able to predict the position of its opponent and where the ball will fly, and judge where to hit the ball to make it easy for the opponent to return it.

Using two types of image sensors, the robot measures the position of the opponent, the position of the opponent’s racket, and the 3-dimensional position and speed of the ball. Sensors at the bottom of the monitor take in the opponent’s movement, while different sensors at the left and right of the monitor track the trajectory and position of the ball in 3 dimensions roughly 80 times every second, while a predictive control program predicts the speed and trajectory of the ball coming back to the robot. All of these measurements are combined to determine where to return the ball so that the rally opponent can he hit it back easily at a similar speed. The robot hand operating the racket is controlled every 1/1000th of a second. Since this table tennis robot makes judgments by itself, it could be said to have the element of “thinking.”