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Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human motion data

created: March 15, 2026, 3:21 p.m. | updated: March 16, 2026, 9:48 a.m.

Human athletes demonstrate versatile and highly-dynamic tennis skills to successfully conduct competitive rallies with a high-speed tennis ball. However, reproducing such behaviors on humanoid robots is difficult, partially due to the lack of perfect humanoid action data or human kinematic motion data in tennis scenarios as reference. In this work, we propose LATENT, a system that Learns Athletic humanoid TEnnis skills from imperfect human motioN daTa. Our key insight is that, despite being imperfect, such quasi-realistic data still provide priors about human primitive skills in tennis scenarios. Our method achieves surprising results in the real world and can stably sustain multi-shot rallies with human players.

18 hours, 54 minutes ago: Hacker News