Sony AI's Ace (Nature cover, beat a pro table tennis player) — running on ROS 2

Can you believe this is running ROS 2? :ping_pong:

Sony AI’s Ace just landed on the cover of Nature — the first robot ever to beat a professional table tennis player.

Let that sink in for a second:

• It tracks a ball moving at 20 m/s with spin over 9,000 rpm
• Perceives it in 10.2 ms (event-based vision)
• Decides and swings on a 1 kHz control loop
• And returns the ball at up to 19.6 m/s

This is physical AI right at the edge of what’s possible — and we’ve been working on the ROS 2 integration and support underneath it. The fact that ROS 2 holds up in a system this demanding says a lot about where the ecosystem is heading.

Huge respect to the Sony AI team. Take a look :backhand_index_pointing_down:

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Impressive! Do you know some details, like which RMW or on what hardware does it run? (I assume some Threadripper CPU?

I couldn’t find anything related to ROS in the paper or supplementary material. Do you have a pointer to where and how they are using ROS, e.g. which controllers they implemented in ros2_control?

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But is ROS 2 ready for “production?” :wink:

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Really interesting !!, but sorry It does not seem to me ROS ecosystem was used here, also concerning the simulator, they have designed their own one (at least this is what mentioned on the article)

Do you have an idea about the noise model what really means there ? Is the noise related to the sensors or what ?

and Thanks for sharing

@khalidbourr @christian May I suggest that when a senior software architect at Sony (i.e. @tomoyafujita) says that a project uses ROS 2 that you perhaps take him at his word. :joy:

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