A new TT robot...

[AJ Scott]

The Ace-robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk

This appears to have been filmed in Japan at a Sony lab.  The Japanese woman player appears to be Taira Mayuka (平真由香--sounds like "TY-la MA-yoo-ka") and the Japanese man is Yoshimura Kazuhiro (吉村和弘--pronounced yo-SHE-moo-la ka-DZOO-he-lo).  Taira hasn't played internationally for a few years now, so she is currently unranked, but Yoshimura, younger brother of Yoshimura Maharu, is the Japanese no. 9 man, currently ranked 62nd in the world.

Taira played Lily Zhang in the 2019 US Open women singles final: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73dBOtiWQeg [highlights].

I think there's a little hyperbole here in the robot video.  It looks like it's easy for an elite player to beat it.  You just hit the ball into the middle.  It doesn't look like the robot can even reach balls that go into the middle.  It also doesn't appear to be able to reach balls that go out wide.  There's still a whole lot of work to do in this area...  When you look at the humanoid robots out there, you see that it appears to be extremely difficult to reproduce human locomotion.  I've often wondered if it's because most of the people developing robots don't have a background in human biology which means they are unable to grasp the complexity of human musculature.  Besides, even if they did understand it, it's probably prohibitively expensive to reproduce it in a humanoid robot.