The excitement surrounding recent strides in humanoid robotics is palpable. They’re being used to assemble electric cars, sort packages, and perform carefully choreographed martial arts on stage. Bipedal robots are even being sent to the frontlines of the Ukraine-Russia war and getting in trouble after startling old ladies on the street.
Sports are also no match for the agile automatons, from shooting hoops to live kickboxing matches in front of a crowd.
Now, Chinese AI robotics company Galbot has designed software that teaches a Unitree G1 humanoid robot how to perform a veritable feat: effectively playing tennis, allowing it to keep its own in a match-up against a human engineer.
A video the company posted to social media shows the white robot holding up what appears to be an unmodified tennis racket, which it uses to easily return the ball by shuffling across the court.
It’s yet another impressive demonstration of how far the tech has come — but whether the robot will be able to keep up with the likes of Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams any time soon remains to be seen, given the lighthanded volleys from the human engineers.
“For the first time, a humanoid robot can sustain high-dynamic, long-horizon tennis rallies with millisecond-level reactions, precise ball striking, and natural whole-body motion,” Galbot claimed in its post. “This marks a leap from mechanical motion imitation to intelligent, decision-driven athletic interaction.”
Your humanoid tennis player is here!
Introducing LATENT (Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data) — the world’s first real-time whole-body planning and control algorithm for athletic humanoid tennis.
For the first time, a humanoid robot can… pic.twitter.com/gCi38wxHVQ
— Galbot (@GalbotRobotics) March 16, 2026
To teach their robot how to play tennis, the company’s engineers built a system that had to rely on “imperfect human motion data” that consists “only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches,” according to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper.
“Our key insight is that, despite being imperfect, such quasi-realistic data still provide priors about human primitive skills in tennis scenarios,” they found. “With further correction and composition, we learn a humanoid policy that can consistently strike incoming balls under a wide range of conditions and return them to target locations, while preserving natural motion styles.”
The engineers argue that the system could have uses beyond tennis as well.
“Although this work primarily focuses on the tennis return task, the proposed framework has the potential to generalize to a broader range of tasks where complete and high-quality human motion data are unavailable,” they concluded.
More on humanoid robots: Company Testing Humanoid Robot Soldiers on Frontlines of Ukraine
The post This Video of a Humanoid Robot Playing Tennis Is Extremely Impressive appeared first on Futurism.
