PingpongDuo

PingpongDuo is a research framework from Archon for humanoid table tennis doubles. Unlike singles, doubles requires teammates to strike in strict alternation while sharing a confined workspace, so the system must handle both striking accuracy and collision risk between the two robots.

It is hierarchical. A team-level planner jointly selects positioning targets and uses learned risk estimates to filter risky proposals, preferentially preserving the current striker's target. At the individual level, separate footwork and striking skills are guided by human motion references, including footwork collected from human doubles play. A racket-arm residual refines strikes after movement, using return feedback from a simulator calibrated with real ball-flight and contact measurements.

The authors report that in simulation the ball-return success rate improves by 13.2% over the state-of-the-art baseline, with about 2 cm positioning error during clearance. In real-world tests, a robot completes a 2.15 m clearance-and-recovery cycle in 2.4 s with a peak speed of 2.23 m/s, and two robots sustain more than 10 consecutive strikes in strict alternation (the page shows 18 consecutive returns). It is a research project with a project page, video and arXiv paper. No code, weights or product access were found. The interactive 3D demo was unavailable on the page.