{{'Newsletter' | t}}
HKU Team Wins Silver Medal in Table Tennis at the World Humanoid Robot Games
The HKU SMASH team wins the silver medal in the robot table tennis competition at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.
The HKU SMASH team—a group of young HKU researchers led by Professor Ping Luo from the School of Computing and Data (SCDS)—secured second place in the table tennis final at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, held recently in Beijing.
Competing against 11 teams from across China and overseas, SMASH advanced to the final after defeating a joint team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Innovation Institute, as well as Shenzhen University, ultimately securing the silver medal.
The SMASH Team specialises in embodied AI, with members comprising primarily HKU PhD students Junli Ren from HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (IDS), Kaixuan Wang and Huayi Wang from SCDS, and Yidan Lu and Tianyang Tang (under the supervision of Professor Peng Lu) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The SMASH system integrates visual perception, ball trajectory prediction, motion planning and whole-body control, while supporting autonomous serving for complete robot-to-robot matches.
Using onboard sensing alone without external cameras or motion-capture systems, SMASH is, to the team’s knowledge, the world’s first humanoid table-tennis system capable of consecutive strikes through onboard perception. It has also achieved rallies of more than 100 consecutive shots with human players and leverages large-scale human motion data to produce more natural, coordinated movements.
Professor Luo said, “Hong Kong provides fertile ground for the development of artificial intelligence, supported by a strong concentration of talent. I hope HKU students will continue to lead and advance the development of embodied AI technologies across the Greater Bay Area.”
The team will continue to advance humanoid robotics through high-dynamic interaction research, using table tennis as a testbed to explore broader real-world applications and future deployment.
Learn more about SMASH from the HKU MMLab’s website (https://mmlab.hk/Smash), or the team’s recently published paper “SMASH: Mastering Scalable Whole-Body Skills for Humanoid Ping-Pong with Egocentric Vision” on arXiv (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01158).
The team rallies with Olympic and World Table Tennis Champion Ning Ding during the opening ceremony of the Games.
The SMASH Team competes against leading teams from China and overseas at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games.
(This article is adapted from https://www.cds.hku.hk/news/hku-smash-team-wins-silver-at-world-humanoid-robot-games-with-world-first-autonomous-humanoid-table-tennis-system/.)