OOAK Table Tennis Forum

If you were to buy a table tennis robot what features

- must it have
- would be nice to have
- aren't needed but often offered by table tennis robots

The features can refer to the robot itself or the way its operated / worked

I'm not talking about "must be able to play like Ma Long" or "must be able to hit the ball back to me like....", I'm talking about realistic practical features that you would expect to fit within a price range of up to £2000 / 2250 euros or $2600.

For me must have:
- must have ability to change spin and speed rates independently
- must be able to change types of spin and speed rates during a program drill
- be programmable so I can design my own routines and these programs can be saved
- have the ability to consistently and accurately fire the ball to all areas of a table

Nice to have:
- a measuring system which relates to the real world. This is really a must but I've included it here because of the problems of measuring ball spin and speed rates, but I think it would be great to be able to set spin and speed rates which are realistic ie in terms of revolutions per second and mph or kph. I could then set routines which mirror real life situations rather than guessing at them using in-house 1-10 speed and spin ratings.
- a control system which gives me ability to change all parameters on the fly
- a control system which gives me freedom not to have walk back to the robot to change settings
- mobility in terms of location from where the ball is fired. players don't all play sat on the table so it would be great to be able to move the robot around, not just on the table but back and forth from the table
- good after market support. I don't want to buy a robot I can't buy replacement parts for should something break or wear out

Not necessary:
As I use multiball when coaching when a collection net isn't used, a collection net isn't a necessity for a robot for me and i prefer the flexibility of being able to fire the balls from anywhere which a collection net would prevent.

And if you could have these features, how much would you be prepared to pay?

Thanks

That's a great list, and it clearly shows your interest is in more than just using it to improve your game.

I think "have the ability to consistently and accurately fire the ball to all areas of a table" is quite difficult to achieve, not because it's not technically possible, but because of the imperfections of balls, even among 3* competition balls.

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You know me well! Selecting balls with a diameter within a smaller tolerance than currently allowed by ITTF would go some way to reducing that problem. As players will use balls with a variety of diameters there becomes a trade off though between scientifically controlled to nth degree and "realistic" retaining relevance.

I saw one yt video with kasumi ishikawa with a robot able to fire tt balls like ZJK etc ... if a robot can behave like top 100 tt players etc ... wat a way to train!!!

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Does anyone know of any studies which have measured typical spin and speed rates of table tennis balls in actual professional play? I'm not talking about scientific studies in controlled environments, more real life measurements of professional players.

At tennis, Hawkeye and other electronic measuring systems display this information for the pro's on the fly. It would be interesting to know this type of information for table tennis pro's and is an area the ITTF should really be investigating when it comes to providing interesting coverage of table tennis events.