First humanoid robot system to achieve consecutive ping-pong strikes using only onboard egocentric vision and whole-body coordination.
April 2, 2026
Original Paper
SMASH: Mastering Scalable Whole-Body Skills for Humanoid Ping-Pong with Egocentric Vision
arXiv · 2604.01158
The Takeaway
It overcomes the extreme latency and motion-blur challenges of egocentric sensing in high-speed robotics, moving humanoid control away from external mocap dependencies toward true autonomous agility.
From the abstract
Existing humanoid table tennis systems remain limited by their reliance on external sensing and their inability to achieve agile whole-body coordination for precise task execution. These limitations stem from two core challenges: achieving low-latency and robust onboard egocentric perception under fast robot motion, and obtaining sufficiently diverse task-aligned strike motions for learning precise yet natural whole-body behaviors. In this work, we present \methodname, a modular system for agile