Playing Tennis like "Deep Blue" Part 1

After the release of the demo video of our 2023 prototype, the BallBOPPer returned to stealth mode. It will reemerge in 2026 when the Ultimate "True Game Play" preview and release are ready!

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 competitive tennis: points, games, sets and matches.

Such a machine is coming, and it is the BallBOPPer Competitive 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

The problem was that the 2023 BallBOPPer hardware was not quite fast enough or reliable enough, and it was still lacking in some key physical capabilities that are needed to enable the True Game Play feature. 

During 2024 we have been building a completely redesigned BallBOPPer True Game Play prototype. The BB True Game Play prototype has the speed and reliability required and also includes additional "yet to be revealed" capabilities that are critical to enabling the playing of points, games sets and matches. 

At this writing, the AI models that autonomously control this hardware are just at the beginning of their training. This training will continue well into 2025 in order to accumulate as much training data as we possibly can and make the initial version useful right out of the box.

Once we release the True Game Play BallBOPPer to users, then they will not only be able to train with it, but every training session they have will help it get even better.

All they will have to do is put their BallBOPPer to work running True Game Play to improve their tennis game, and then afterwards, connect it to a wi-fi network for a few minutes to upload the playing data. That data will then be incorporated into the underlying models, which will then be updated on back down to their BB to make their ensuing training sessions even better.

The more training sessions all of the BB owners run, the greater the value the BallBOPPer will ultimately bring to their tennis training.

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