Tennis Playing Robot! This Humanoid Learned Tennis From Watching Human Motion Data.

A student in China just taught a robot to play tennis. Not robot tennis, actual tennis. Dynamic footwork, whole-body coordination, rapid reactions. The robot learned all this from standard human motion capture data. Teaching a humanoid robot to play tennis is quite the challenge, it requires timing, balance, athletic movement and prediction. Zhikai Zhang, a student from China, taught this robot to play tennis from human video alone, no explicit programming was added. The implications are huge, if this can be replicated successfully across other skills simply from video then we would see rapid capability improvements from the humanoids. It's simply a question of training data. Robotic movement capabilities are increasing rapidly, if the training makes similar leaps forward then we're in for some serious exponential growth.