Robotics Special: Robots ace humans at ping-pong

Welcome back, Superhuman. The next time you check the sports feed and catch robots going toe-to-toe with humans (and winning), just know we warned you. Last week, Toyota unveiled a robot that could drain a free basketball throw from half-court. This week, Sony’s new table tennis robot is wiping the floor with elite ping pong players. Meanwhile, in China, a humanoid robot just finished a half-marathon faster than any human ever.

WHAT’S NEXT

The most important news and breakthroughs in robotics this week

1. Sony's new robot just smoked elite table tennis players: Video games were one thing, but AI beating elite players at physical sports is a whole other ball game. Sony AI's Project Ace has become the first autonomous robot to defeat elite human table tennis players, winning 3 of 5 matches, and outscoring humans 16 to 8 on direct serves. The research signals a new era of robots that can match humans in fast, unpredictable real-world tasks. Watch it in action here.

2. Tesla creeps into Waymo's Texas turf with robotaxi rollout: The company is launching its robotaxi service in Houston and Dallas, hemmed into tiny geofenced zones. The rollout follows pilots in Austin and San Francisco, with Phoenix, Miami, and five other cities planned for later this year. The move trials rival Waymo, which is already operating fully driverless in both cities. Tesla is racing to prove that its full self-driving technology (and the enormous valuation resting on it) can deliver at scale.

3. Delivery robots are becoming eyes for the blind: Coco Robotics is putting its fleet of sidewalk delivery robots to work for a new purpose. As they navigate cities, the robots are now feeding real-time hazard data to BlindSquare, the world's most widely used GPS app for visually impaired people. Users get a spoken alert in 26 languages, roughly 10 meters before reaching an obstacle. It's a rare case of infrastructure built for robots that turns out to work even better for humans.

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ROBOTS IN ACTION

How robots are transforming the world around us

🏃‍♂️ Record Run: A robot built by Chinese company Honor completed this year’s half-marathon in Beijing in a little over 50 minutes, beating the human world record of 57 minutes. It’s a staggering leap from last year, when it took the winning robot more than two-and-a-half hours to cross the finish line. Watch the historic moment unfold here, and compare it to last year’s debacle here to see how far humanoid robots have come in a year.

✈️ Up and Away: German engineers have successfully tested an aircraft with wings that continuously morph their shape in real time. Paired with an AI flight control system, the wings detect turbulence and adjust instantly, cutting drag and spreading control across the entire surface rather than relying on separate moving parts. It's an early but significant step toward aircraft that are safer, more efficient, and harder to break.

👷 Build Bot: For startup Reframe Systems, America's housing crisis is a systems problem. The company is building modular homes inside deployable microfactories in areas where housing is needed most, slashing construction time, skilled-labor dependency, and emissions. Finished homes are already occupied in Massachusetts, and the company is now setting up in California to replace homes destroyed in last year's wildfires.

INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

Everything else you need to know this week

Here are the biggest developments in the robotics space that you should know about:

• Chef Robotics claims its kitchen robots have assembled 100M servings in commercial production — a major milestone for large-scale food automation.

• Reliable Robotics has picked up $160M in funding to fast-track FAA approval for its “robot pilot” system, bringing fully uncrewed cargo flights closer to reality.

• The Pentagon has unveiled a budget proposal to pour $54B into drones and autonomous warfare — larger than the entire military budgets of most nations.

• Scientists have built heat-triggered robots that launch hundreds of times their own height and boomerang through the air without using any electronic parts.

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ROBOT OF THE WEEK

A robot that caught our eye this week

In 2017, Raghav Gupta was trying to figure out how to enjoy the home-cooked meals he grew up with without spending hours in the kitchen or shelling out for a private chef. He decided to turn to robotics and founded Posha.

A countertop robot that's essentially a "coffee machine for food”, Posha enables users to select recipes and add pre-measured ingredients, while the device handles the actual cooking. Gupta claims the robot slashes kitchen time by about 70%, turning an hour of meal prep into a 10-20 minute affair.

You can check it out here.

ROBO REELS

Watch: Humanoid robot deadlifts 65 pounds without breaking a sweat

Oregon-based Agility Robotics put its bipedal robot Digit through a new test: deadlifting a 65-pound weight with controlled, repeatable precision. The feat required whole-body coordination across arms, legs, and torso, learned through thousands of simulated trials. Watch the unreal footage here.

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Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team