Playing Tennis like "Deep Blue" Part 1

Imagine you had a portable machine that you can take to any tennis court, turn it on, and instantly be able to play tennis with it.

Not a machine for simply hitting tennis balls (any old ball machine can do that), we mean a machine that can truly play tennis: points, games, sets and matches.

Such a machine is coming, and it is the BallBOPPer Tennis Training Robot.

To be sure, we have received comments from a number of players with links to YouTube videos showing humanoid robots that appear to already be expert at playing tennis. Of course these are fake. There are no racket wielding humanoid robots in the world today, at least not ones that can run around a tennis court bashing tennis balls. 

Our aspiration to develop a "purpose built" tennis playing robot was not inspired by these clever YouTube animations, but instead by Deep Blue, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that defeated Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. 

Deep Blue revolutionized Chess by revealing solutions to Chess problems that had not previously been conceived. Chess masters today mostly work with, rather than against, the latest Chess AI models seeking to understand the counterintuitive and novel strategies they use in order to incorporate these strategies into their own competitive play.

RoBOPPics is determined to do for tennis what Deep Blue has done for Chess - deliver an AI driven tennis robot, that through continuous model training and development, reveals new solutions to competitive tennis problems that no tennis player or coach has previously imagined.

New solutions to hard tennis problems that can help you win.

In order to play even a single tennis point, the BallBOPPer has to have the capability to track the ball being returned by the player, intercept it, and then instantly and autonomously return it. 

We call this feature True Game Play. 

In order to realize True Game Play (TGP), RoBOPPics has developed a number of key components: 

• the AI PRO Launcher, which is low in weight and small in size, but both powerful and accurate enough to hit any spot on the court
• the BallBOPPer App for designing, controlling and running "Patterns of Play" - including the unique capabilities called "Repeating Ranges" and "Alternative Shots"
• the Rover and AI Auto Nav with their combined ability to accurately transport the AI Pro Launcher around the court at human-like speeds
• and the Reloader with its ability to autonomously find, wrangle and reload the balls from the court

It was our intent to offer the BallBOPPer, including all of these ready-to-play components, last year through a Crowdfunding campaign. The problem was that the 2023 BallBOPPer hardware was not quite fast enough or precise enough, and it was still lacking in some key physical capabilities that are needed to enable the True Game Play feature. 

The new and improved BallBOPPer Production Prototype has improved in speed and precision, and it has additional capabilities that are important steps towards True Game Play. 

But although we will soon have True Game Play "ready" hardware in in the Production Prototype, the AI models that autonomously control this hardware are just at the beginning of their training.

These AI models will only ever be as good as the sensor data that they are trained on. We are generating as much data as we can, but we do not have enough. We need more. A lot more.

It will take a substantial community of players using the BallBOPPer before we will begin to see these models become fully operational. If you happen to be one of the lucky Crowdfunding Sponsors of these systems, then we need your help.

All you have to do is put your BallBOPPer to work running Patterns of Play to improve your tennis game, and then afterwards, connect it to a wi-fi network for a few minutes to upload the sensor data.

The more data we have, the closer the "Beta" TGP models get to being fully True Game Play capable - and the greater the value the BallBOPPer will ultimately be for your tennis training.

Add your name to our mailing list at the bottom of this page and you will be notified as soon as the Crowdfunding Campaign is available.