For some reason, I keep running across things that I now discover have been around for ages (well, at least a couple of years), but that never “pinged” on my radar before. For example, I just ran across this video of a Badminton Playing Robot.

 

Badminton is an interesting game. I used to play with my chum Alvin. He would play in a style he called, “the old man’s game,” which basically involved him standing in the center of his side of the court hitting the shuttlecock to the four corners of my side, with me frantically scampering around trying to keep up.

It was as much as I could to the return the shuttlecock to Alvin’s side of the court, where it invariably found him relaxing in the center of the court. To be honest, I was the only one getting any exercise. At the end of our games, I ended up collapsed on the floor exhausted, while Alvin barely broke a sweat.

The badminton playing robot is surprisingly minimalist in nature and quite clever. If you look closely at the various videos on YouTube, some incarnations of the robot seem to have only a single racket, while others appear to show dual rackets – one swinging in the horizontal plane and one capable (although I’ve not seen it in action) of swinging in the vertical plane.

Most of these videos appear to originate circa 2016, which means the robot is probably sensing only the position of the shuttlecock. Also, the human players seem to be restraining themselves to relatively basic shots, as opposed to mixing things up with their fastest shots or lightly tapping the shuttlecock just over the net, for example.

However, things are moving at a fast pace in the sensor and robotic worlds, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see a more advanced version of this little rascal handling some much trickier shots in the not-so-distant future.

I wonder how long it will be before this robot is equipped with machine vision and artificial intelligence. As well as sensing the shuttlecock, the robot could observe its opponent and perhaps use body language and other “tells” to anticipate trick shots. On the other hand, I have no idea what such a robot would make of the second item in this video of amazing badminton shots.

 

I still can’t believe what I just saw in this second video. Given a sufficiently advanced AI-enabled badminton playing robot, I can imagine it freezing up saying “what the heck just happened?” to itself.

The problem with YouTube is that it’s hard to stop. For example, I just saw this video of a humanoid robot arm playing badminton. I can’t say why – I know the arm isn’t intelligent – but I still found this video to be a tad disquieting.

 

How about you? What do you think? Are badminton and ping pong just the low-hanging fruit of racket-based games? Can we expect to see tennis-playing robots in the not-so-distant future. If so, how long do you think it will be before robots can beat humans at these sorts of sports?