KUKA Group
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2015–2026
3:53 · 15M views · Mar 11, 2014
A KUKA commercial staging a table tennis match between German star Timo Boll and a KUKA KR AGILUS industrial robot. It is a polished showcase of robot speed and precision.
HN links it as the go-to example of fast robot reactions and robots playing table tennis, with some skepticism that it was staged marketing.
7 comments from Hacker News
I own a Panasonic Robot welding cell, and I keep up with numbers of robots sold like that - I know your numbers are correct. My experience with programming the Panasonic is that there is quite a learning curve to get over, to do the most basic things with it. I think the small numbers of robot adoption could be a reflection on this difficulty, combined with high cost. My cell was $85,000. The robot was a great value at that price though, it generates about $2000 an hour worth of product. Paid for in 40 hours of welding, good for 10,000 more hours before its worn out. The Baxter should prove me wrong, but I think it is just an underperforming platform. The current owners of robot tech would view it as under capable compared to arms from Kuka or Motoman or Panasonic etc. this video think the non-robot users, those companies getting a first robot, would find Baxter easy to use but would be less inclined to go buy one; getting a robot is a big step. I have to think that ROS getting better and better, with offline programming, will help adoption. We are at the UNIX terminal phase of computing, or at best we are at a Windows 3.1 level. Nobody has made the iphone of robots yet, one that is very capable yet easy to program. Once we can get to a few swipes to get result, robot placement will increase rapidly. I love how repeatable the result is, and how fast it produces parts. It is about 3x more productive than my most productive welder, with equal or better accuracy (we still hand weld
This is great, I remember being sorely disappointed by the hyped up Timo Boll vs Kuka robot 12 years ago. I thought it was going to be a real match and seemed like the robot would destroy him, but ended up just being a marketing stunt and felt like a fixed fight, with no real digging into the tech or why the robot "lost". Still some cool footage: this video
Kuka had this demo years ago: this video Nowadays, if you’re running a 2–3B parameter foundation model on a standard computer, you’ll probably get a rollout frequency of 1 to 10 Hz. ACT would be faster, but I still don’t think it’s fast enough.
I think lots of companies have beaten Tesla to a working robot. Honda's ASIMO has been around for over 20 years: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Kuka makes industrial robots as part of its core business and for playing table tennis: this video [LINK]
Is it too much to ask for a humanoid robot to play ping pong with nunchucks as well as Bruce Lee ? Or as good as Tim with paddles ? [LINK] this video Or is this the best we can do in my lifetime : robotic soccer [LINK]