# Sony's Project Ace Robot Defeats Elite and Professional Table Tennis Players

> Sony AI has built a robot that can beat professional table tennis players, and the research earned the cover of Nature. Project Ace is a full physical system that perceives the ball, plans a shot, and swings, all in about 20.2 milliseconds end to end, more than ten times faster than the roughly 230 milliseconds an elite human takes to react. In competitive matches it defeated both top university players and professionals, which is a meaningfully higher bar than the practice-partner demos robots usually manage. The achievement is less about ping pong and more about proving that physical AI, systems that sense and act in the messy real world under hard time limits, is maturing past the lab. Table tennis is a nearly ideal stress test: the ball moves fast, the geometry is unforgiving, and there is no time to think twice. Cracking it suggests the same perception-and-control loop could eventually handle other split-second physical tasks, from manufacturing to sports training, where reacting in milliseconds is the whole game.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Sony AI · Published Thursday, August 27, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Sony AI has built a robot that can beat professional table tennis players, and the research earned the cover of Nature. Project Ace is a full physical system that perceives the ball, plans a shot, and swings, all in about 20.2 milliseconds end to end, more than ten times faster than the roughly 230 milliseconds an elite human takes to react. In competitive matches it defeated both top university players and professionals, which is a meaningfully higher bar than the practice-partner demos robots usually manage. The achievement is less about ping pong and more about proving that physical AI, systems that sense and act in the messy real world under hard time limits, is maturing past the lab. Table tennis is a nearly ideal stress test: the ball moves fast, the geometry is unforgiving, and there is no time to think twice. Cracking it suggests the same perception-and-control loop could eventually handle other split-second physical tasks, from manufacturing to sports training, where reacting in milliseconds is the whole game.

## Source

[Read the full story at Sony AI](https://ai.sony/blog/inside-project-ace-discover-the-robot-athlete-that-competes-with-professional-table-tennis-players/)

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