Empirical Inference

Learning anticipation policies for robot table tennis

2011

Conference Paper

ei


Playing table tennis is a difficult task for robots, especially due to their limitations of acceleration. A key bottleneck is the amount of time needed to reach the desired hitting position and velocity of the racket for returning the incoming ball. Here, it often does not suffice to simply extrapolate the ball's trajectory after the opponent returns it but more information is needed. Humans are able to predict the ball's trajectory based on the opponent's moves and, thus, have a considerable advantage. Hence, we propose to incorporate an anticipation system into robot table tennis players, which enables the robot to react earlier while the opponent is performing the striking movement. Based on visual observation of the opponent's racket movement, the robot can predict the aim of the opponent and adjust its movement generation accordingly. The policies for deciding how and when to react are obtained by reinforcement learning. We conduct experiments with an existing robot player to show that the learned reaction policy can significantly improve the performance of the overall system.

Author(s): Wang, Z. and Lampert, CH. and Mülling, K. and Schölkopf, B. and Peters, J.
Pages: 332-337
Year: 2011
Month: September
Day: 0
Editors: NM Amato
Publisher: IEEE

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2011.6094892
Event Name: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011)
Event Place: San Francisco, CA, USA

Address: Piscataway, NJ, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-1-61284-454-1

Links: PDF
Web

BibTex

@inproceedings{WangLMSP2011,
  title = {Learning anticipation policies for robot table tennis },
  author = {Wang, Z. and Lampert, CH. and M{\"u}lling, K. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B. and Peters, J.},
  pages = {332-337 },
  editors = {NM Amato},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA},
  month = sep,
  year = {2011},
  doi = {10.1109/IROS.2011.6094892 },
  month_numeric = {9}
}