IBM Researchers Built a Drone That Can Play Ping Pong

Table tennis, that old summer camp staple, seems to have become the official sport of the tech start-up. Nowadays, no hip tech office is complete without a ping-pong table or two for hardworking employees. So it's almost natural that a group of researchers at IBM have combined table tennis and tech to create the world’s first ping pong-playing drone.

According to Gizmodo, “Jae-Eun Park and the rest of the computer vision research team at IBM have successfully taught an IRIS+ drone to track the trajectory of a ping pong ball headed its way, and intercept it in order to return the shot.”

The ping pong drone still has a long way to go before it can compete with professional human players, but it’s still an impressive first step. Check it out above.

[h/t: Gizmodo]

Banner Image Credit: Wang Zhou, Youtube.