A Robot Ping-Pong Player: Experiment in Real-Time Intelligent Control

This describes a robot system able to play ping-pong against humans. The primary development described is an "expert system" architecture on which the program is based. The expert system is novel in that it operates in real time, uses both symbolic and numeric information, and must deal with continuously changing input data. 

It has been designed to be coached to even higher levels of performance. In addition, the work covers a broad spectrum of the robotics area, describing the specialized techniques allowing the robot to see the ball in flight and move rapidly to a computed position. We have had to push the state of the art in novel directions to accomplish the task, encountering new problems and solutions of general interest to robotics.