I finally realized I could've been a professional ping pong player. I have good reason to believe in my ping pong skills, thanks to Forpheus, a robot I met this week at CES in Las Vegas. Made by Omron, Forpheus first appeared at CES last year to show off its ping pong prowess. It's back this year with an expanded range of movement and enhanced prediction skills. When I tell people I played ping pong with a robot this week, the first thing they ask is: "Did you win?"

Guinness World Records has recognized a robot with a unique ability: a machine called FORPHEUS is officially the "first robot table tennis tutor." The contraption, which holds a ping pong paddle and can play against and even teach a human, taps artificial intelligence to determine the ability of its opponent. It uses two vision sensors to keep a robotic eye on the ball, as well as a movement sensor that focuses on the human player's movement. Cameras over the table keep track of the ball's position at a rate of 80 times a second. "Omron's mission is a future where humans and machines harmonise together," Tako Oya, the lead developer of the project at Omron Corporation, said in a video about the machine.

But for a collaborative sport like ping pong, it's not always easy to find the perfect partner. Brothers, Alexander and Harrison Chen, solved this problem by building the "Trainerbot." This ping pong robot works in tandem with a smart phone app and allows users to create their own custom shots by choosing the speed, direction, and spin with which the Trainerbot shoots balls. Alexander and Harrison say they got the idea after they both moved away from home and lost their playing partner. Every summer and winter break, the two brothers would team up to create prototypes until they came up with the 1.2 kilogram, 16 by 32 centimeter Trainerbot.

Is this seriously cool or what? You can play ping pong against this robot, with it's dual vision systems, anticipation algorithms, self balancing algorithms, it's able to play back the ping pong ball to you no matter where you play it on the table. Perhaps with training, with some tuning of the anticipation of effects slicing and lifting in the ball, soon enough this robot may be able to beat even the best ping pong players in the world?