A fully autonomous humanoid returns machine-fed shuttles in a motion-capture arena; overlaid arcs show an incoming (blue) and returned (orange) trajectory. Abstract--Humanoid robots have demonstrated strong capabilities for interacting with static scenes across locomotion, manipulation, and more challenging loco-manipulation tasks. Y et the real world is dynamic, and quasi-static interactions are insufficient to cope with diverse environmental conditions. As a step toward more dynamic interaction scenarios, we present a reinforcement-learning-based training pipeline that produces a unified whole-body controller for humanoid badminton, enabling coordinated lower-body footwork and upper-body striking without motion priors or expert demonstrations. Training follows a three-stage curriculum--first footwork acquisition, then precision-guided racket swing generation, and finally task-focused refinement--yielding motions in which both legs and arms serve the hitting objective. For deployment, we incorporate an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate and predict shuttlecock trajectories for target striking. We also introduce a prediction-free variant that dispenses with EKF and explicit trajectory prediction. T o validate the framework, we conduct five sets of experiments in both simulation and the real world. In simulation, two robots sustain a rally of 21 consecutive hits. Moreover, the prediction-free variant achieves successful hits with comparable performance relative to the target-known policy. In real-world tests, both prediction and controller modules exhibit high accuracy, and on-court hitting achieves an outgoing shuttle speed up to 19.1 m/s with a mean return landing distance of 4 m. These experimental results show that our proposed training scheme can deliver highly dynamic while precise goal striking in badminton, and can be adapted to more dynamics-critical domains. Humanoid platforms have been proposed as general-purpose embodied agents for human-compatible skills [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Despite rapid progress in locomotion and motion imitation, agile, contact-rich interactions with fast-moving objects under tight reaction windows remain underexplored.

ANYmal-D combines robotics, artificial intelligence and sports, showing how advanced robots can take on dynamic, fast-paced games. At ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab, engineers have created ANYmal-D, a four-legged robot that can play badminton with people. This project brings together robotics, artificial intelligence and sports, showing how advanced robots can take on dynamic, fast-paced games. ANYmal-D's design and abilities are opening up new possibilities for human-robot collaboration in sports and beyond. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy Report Get my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox.

In the dynamic and rapid tactic involvements of turn-based sports, badminton stands out as an intrinsic paradigm that requires alter-dependent decision-making of players. While the advancement of learning from offline expert data in sequential decision-making has been witnessed in various domains, how to rally-wise imitate the behaviors of human players from offline badminton matches has remained underexplored. Replicating opponents' behavior benefits players by allowing them to undergo strategic development with direction before matches. However, directly applying existing methods suffers from the inherent hierarchy of the match and the compounding effect due to the turn-based nature of players alternatively taking actions. In this paper, we propose RallyNet, a novel hierarchical offline imitation learning model for badminton player behaviors: (i) RallyNet captures players' decision dependencies by modeling decision-making processes as a contextual Markov decision process. (ii) RallyNet leverages the experience to generate context as the agent's intent in the rally. (iii) To generate more realistic behavior, RallyNet leverages Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) to model the interactions between players by introducing a valuable inductive bias for learning player behaviors. In this manner, RallyNet links player intents with interaction models with GBM, providing an understanding of interactions for sports analytics. We extensively validate RallyNet with the largest available real-world badminton dataset consisting of men's and women's singles, demonstrating its ability to imitate player behaviors. Results reveal RallyNet's superiority over offline imitation learning methods and state-of-the-art turn-based approaches, outperforming them by at least 16% in mean rule-based agent normalization score. Furthermore, we discuss various practical use cases to highlight RallyNet's applicability.

In the competitive realm of sports, optimal performance necessitates rigorous management of nutrition and physical conditioning. Specifically, in badminton, the agility and precision required make it an ideal candidate for motion analysis through video analytics. This study leverages advanced neural network methodologies to dissect video footage of badminton matches, aiming to extract detailed insights into player kinetics and biomechanics. Through the analysis of stroke mechanics, including hand-hip coordination, leg positioning, and the execution angles of strokes, the research aims to derive predictive models that can suggest improvements in stance, technique, and muscle orientation. These recommendations are designed to mitigate erroneous techniques, reduce the risk of joint fatigue, and enhance overall performance. Utilizing a vast array of data available online, this research correlates players' physical attributes with their in-game movements to identify muscle activation patterns during play. The goal is to offer personalized training and nutrition strategies that align with the specific biomechanical demands of badminton, thereby facilitating targeted performance enhancements.

Agent forecasting systems have been explored to investigate agent patterns and improve decision-making in various domains, e.g., pedestrian predictions and marketing bidding. Badminton represents a fascinating example of a multifaceted turn-based sport, requiring both sophisticated tactic developments and alternate-dependent decision-making. Recent deep learning approaches for player tactic forecasting in badminton show promising performance partially attributed to effective reasoning about rally-player interactions. However, a critical obstacle lies in the unclear functionality of which features are learned for simulating players' behaviors by black-box models, where existing explainers are not equipped with turn-based and multi-output attributions. To bridge this gap, we propose a turn-based feature attribution approach, ShuttleSHAP, for analyzing forecasting models in badminton based on variants of Shapley values. ShuttleSHAP is a model-agnostic explainer that aims to quantify contribution by not only temporal aspects but also player aspects in terms of multifaceted cues. Incorporating the proposed analysis tool into the state-of-the-art turn-based forecasting model on the benchmark dataset reveals that it is, in fact, insignificant to reason about past strokes, while conventional sequential models have greater impacts. Instead, players' styles influence the models for the future simulation of a rally. On top of that, we investigate and discuss the causal analysis of these findings and demonstrate the practicability with local analysis.

Ball trajectory data are one of the most fundamental and useful information in the evaluation of players' performance and analysis of game strategies. Although vision-based object tracking techniques have been developed to analyze sport competition videos, it is still challenging to recognize and position a high-speed and tiny ball accurately. In this paper, we develop a deep learning network, called TrackNet, to track the tennis ball from broadcast videos in which the ball images are small, blurry, and sometimes with afterimage tracks or even invisible. The proposed heatmap-based deep learning network is trained to not only recognize the ball image from a single frame but also learn flying patterns from consecutive frames. TrackNet takes images with a size of $640\times360$ to generate a detection heatmap from either a single frame or several consecutive frames to position the ball and can achieve high precision even on public domain videos. The network is evaluated on the video of the men's singles final at the 2017 Summer Universiade, which is available on YouTube. The precision, recall, and F1-measure of TrackNet reach $99.7\%$, $97.3\%$, and $98.5\%$, respectively. To prevent overfitting, 9 additional videos are partially labeled together with a subset from the previous dataset to implement 10-fold cross-validation, and the precision, recall, and F1-measure are $95.3\%$, $75.7\%$, and $84.3\%$, respectively. A conventional image processing algorithm is also implemented to compare with TrackNet. Our experiments indicate that TrackNet outperforms conventional method by a big margin and achieves exceptional ball tracking performance. The dataset and demo video are available at https://nol.cs.nctu.edu.tw/ndo3je6av9/.

The study found that 55% of Canadian adults would like their employer to provide extended leave opportunities, 45% would prefer not to work at fixed times (i.e. "Flexibility and empowerment will be the new work currencies and productivity will be redefined," says Badminton. "Flexible payment schedules for workers will come into effect administered by automated systems that measure output, not hours put in." Finally, many people are also concerned that work is interfering with their personal lives. "Whether it's cutting corners to save time, or paying other people to do their job for them, Canadian adults are considering some unique ways to take back control at work" says Black.