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The Duel: Timo Boll vs. KUKA Robot

KUKA Group · 14.7M views · 2014-03-11 · 3:53

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Overview

A KUKA commercial staging a table tennis match between German star Timo Boll and a KUKA KR AGILUS industrial robot. It is a polished showcase of robot speed and precision.

On Hacker News

HN links it as the go-to example of fast robot reactions and robots playing table tennis, with some skepticism that it was staged marketing.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2026

Topics

RoboticsSports & athletics
Search by tags
kukatable tennisrobot armtimo boll

What people said

OisinMoran · 2026-04 · Criticism

This is great, I remember being sorely disappointed by the hyped up Timo Boll vs Kuka robot 12 years ago. I thought it was going to be a real match and seemed like the robot would destroy him, but ended up just being a marketing stunt and felt like a fixed fight, with no real digging into the tech or why the robot "lost". Still some cool footage: [VIDEO]

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charleszyong · 2025-06 · Reference

Kuka had this demo years ago: [VIDEO] Nowadays, if you’re running a 2–3B parameter foundation model on a standard computer, you’ll probably get a rollout frequency of 1 to 10 Hz. ACT would be faster, but I still don’t think it’s fast enough.

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clouddrover · 2022-08 · Reference

I think lots of companies have beaten Tesla to a working robot. Honda's ASIMO has been around for over 20 years: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Kuka makes industrial robots as part of its core business and for playing table tennis: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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Sources

Video by KUKA Group, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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