Humanoid robot plays tennis with humans, returns fast shots in real time

Galbot Robotics, in collaboration with researchers from Tsinghua University and Peking University, has developed a humanoid robot capable of playing tennis with humans in real time. Demonstrated on the Unitree G1 robot, the system—called LATENT (Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data)—enables the robot to react with millisecond-level speed, accurately strike balls, and sustain dynamic rallies while moving naturally across the court. This marks the first time a humanoid robot has achieved high-dynamic, long-duration tennis rallies with such precision and whole-body coordination. A major challenge addressed by the researchers was the scarcity of comprehensive human motion data for tennis, a sport characterized by rapid ball speeds and complex player movements. Instead of recording full matches, they collected short motion fragments (forehands, backhands, side steps) from five players within a small 3×5-meter court, generating about five hours of data. This dataset was used to train the robot to replicate individual