A table tennis racquet and ball at the Asian Games Doha 2006. (Photo by Christof Koepsel/Getty Images for DAGOC)
Japanese electronics company Omron will return to exhibit at CES in Las Vegas in January. Sports fans in attendance might want to look out for the company’s table tennis robot, Forpheus.
Forpheus is a table tennis machine that played ping pong against humans during CES 2018. The machine uses artificial intelligence not to defeat humans in ping-pong competition, but instead to train them, playing to keep rallies alive. Forpheus uses artificial intelligence to determine the skill level of an opponent, and then adjusts its own performance in real time to match its opponents skill level, increasing or decreasing its ability during a match depending on the other player.
“What we’re trying to show is our vision,” said Mike Chen, Omron’s Automation Group Manager, at CES 2018. “This is our vision of harmony between man and machine, or people and technology. What we have here is the representation.”
Omron first built Forpheus in 2013. In recent years, the company has added functionality to give Forpheus abilities such as tossing a ping-pong ball to perform a serve, and predicting the type of shot a player plans to hit based on motion sensor technology that analyzes the arm angle of an opponent and the incoming ball trajectory. The machine also has facial recognition technology to determine the mood of a player throughout the match, and can vocalize sounds appropriate to the current state of the match to help keep a user engaged.
SportTechie Takeaway
Given the popularity of Forpheus at CES 2018, the ping-pong playing robot is expected to return for 2019. While Forpheus is a one-of-a-kind development machine that is not available to consumers, it represents an opportunity for Omron to showcase how humans can positively interact with machine learning devices. Although the outcome in this case is only as simple as creating a world full of better ping-pong players.
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