If you want to ask which sport best represents China, most people will blurt out: "table tennis".
Among the various sports in China, table tennis is one of the few sports that is at the top level in the world in terms of professional sports performance, private ratings and participant population. one.
Let’s talk about the competition results first. Since joining the Olympic Games in 1988, this sport has produced 32 gold medals, and China has won 28 of them.
Let’s look at the audience group and participating population. In February 2017, Liu Guoliang, then head coach of the Chinese table tennis team and now chairman of the China Table Tennis Association, revealed on Weibo that the number of people participating in table tennis in mainland China more than twice a week and for more than an hour at a time is as high as 83 million.
In addition, data from the International Table Tennis Federation show that in 2019, the number of television broadcasts of the federation’s major competitions was 1.41 billion (including the World Table Tennis Championships, World Cup, and Tour Table Tennis Championships). games, but not the finals). Among them, China Central Television contributed 89% of the audience.
Because of the excellent competition results and the large number of participants, table tennis has become a big piece of cake. According to a survey by the Qianzhan Research Institute, the market size of China's table tennis industry in 2019 was approximately 21.3 billion yuan, and is expected to reach 32.7 billion yuan by 2025.
However, even so, the development of this sport in China is still subject to many restrictions. Under the vigorous urbanization process, the supply of sports venues and facilities in China cannot fully meet market demand. Data from the State Sports General Administration show that in 2019, the number of table tennis venues in China was only 805,600. Comparing the data released by Liu Guoliang, the 83 million "private Zhang Jike/Zhang Yining" have less than 0.01 table tennis courts per capita.
At the same time, study, work, and family have squeezed the time for table tennis enthusiasts to play. The younger generation mostly has only children, and their spare time is occupied by social software, short videos, e-sports and other diverse entertainment methods. It is becoming increasingly difficult for table tennis players to find someone to play with them. Although they can find professional coaches, the training is also boring and the choice Less trouble and high cost. All of these have led to the expansion of table tennis participation, the further popularization of the project, and the improvement of the skills of the participants, facing structural challenges.
It is not easy to let robots serve as sparring partners
On May 21-22, the 2021 Qualcomm Technology and Cooperation Summit was held in Held at the Beijing Water Cube. Among the more than 300 technology demonstrations presented together with more than 100 partners, a table tennis serving robot named Pombot attracted a lot of attention. There are three experience areas on site. Participants can choose the difficulty coefficient according to their own level through education mode and ranking mode to experience the charm of sports technology empowered by Qualcomm. It is worth mentioning that the world table tennis champion Ding Ning also came to the scene to experience it and brought an interesting interaction.
This robot comes from Shanghai Pombot, a sports technology startup company with robotics and artificial intelligence as its core technologies, targeting table tennis. TECHNOLOGY LIMITED.
After 2015, with China’s per capita GDP exceeding 8,000 US dollars and policy calls, China has set off a national sports and fitness craze. Pombot, which has a deep affection for the sport of table tennis, has embarked on the entrepreneurial journey of table tennis artificial intelligence/robots.
However, at the beginning, the Pombot R&D team took a detour and built a robot that can play table tennis between man and machine. Although this product can fully reflect its artificial intelligence technology, it does not accurately address the user's pain points.
The biggest pain point for table tennis enthusiasts is not sparring, but how to achieve technical finalization through multi-ball training, which is what we call muscle memory. At the practical level, high-quality multi-ball training can strengthen single skills and comprehensive skills, improve players' sensitivity and adaptability, and is an indispensable training link. After a period of research, Pombote also discovered a wonderful law in the daily teaching and training of professional table tennis teams.
Pombot adjusted the direction of product research and development, switching from sparring robots to serving robots. On the one hand, it refocused on user pain points; It also helps liberate manpower in table tennis training - as a sparring partner, the work is undoubtedly extremely boring; there is currently a lack of intelligent data analysis systems in table tennis; Pombot developed the table tennis Hawkeye system to digitize table tennis and provide better assistance train. Table tennis has its own project characteristics:
Most of the high-speed cameras on the market have a resolution of 720P, which makes it difficult to track the movement of table tennis. High-precision capture and collection. Therefore, the prerequisite for intelligent table tennis is that the camera must have higher speed and resolution.
Although deep learning can recognize text, images, sounds and other data, in the process of image processing, it can mostly segment large objects in the picture, such as table tennis. The small proportion in the picture and the lack of obvious features on the surface are also a major technical difficulty.
Massive table tennis trajectories, forces, angles, speeds, etc. not only have a large amount of data, but also have multiple dimensions, which pose high demands on the computing performance and communication capabilities of robot chips. Require. How to solve the above pain points has become a difficult problem that Pombot must overcome.
How to serve like an athlete
At first, Pombot found a chip manufacturer to provide a solution. The power basically meets the requirements, but because it is a computer chip, the camera system after integrating the chip is bulky, which is not conducive to comprehensive photography and collection of the entire table from a high altitude. Moreover, the power consumption of the equipment and the cost of the entire solution are very high.
To meet the three conditions of sufficiently strong computing power, lighter hardware, and stronger communication capabilities and range, Pombot thought of smartphone chips.
In the field of smartphones, Qualcomm has ranked first in the mobile chip market share for many years. In recent years, it has continued to expand its lead in the 5G chip market. More importantly, Qualcomm also launched the world's first robot platform that supports 5G and AI - the Qualcomm Robot RB5 platform. This solution could well meet Pombot's needs, and the two parties quickly reached a cooperation.
The cooperation mainly focuses on three aspects: chips, wireless communications and IoT.
Pombert’s table tennis robot solution mainly includes the Hawkeye system and the serving robot. In order to ensure that the ball's trajectory is captured more accurately, Hawkeye uses a binocular vision system supported by two cameras. The frame rate of the camera reaches 200 Hz - which means that two images must be processed simultaneously within 5 milliseconds. 720P photos. In the field of deep learning, the implementation of this technology is actually an extremely difficult matter.
This robot platform uses Qualcomm’s QRB5165 processor specially designed for robot applications, integrating an eight-core CPU, a powerful GPU, and multiple DSPs (including computing, audio and sensors) and ISP.
The platform uses the industry-leading Qualcomm AI engine, which enables the overall AI computing power of the platform to reach 15 trillion times per second, which is equivalent to the top The level of the graphics card can well meet the large-scale reasoning needs of robot AI and machine learning; coupled with Qualcomm's leading ISP, it can capture fast motion, professional-level photos and videos, and can bring a processing speed of 2 billion pixels per second. Therefore, the RB5 platform combines powerful AI performance with cutting-edge image processing capabilities.
In addition, the RB5 platform can support 5G networks through supporting modules. With the 5G network, the Pombot table tennis robot's requirement for low-latency data communication is easily solved. It can instantly feed back training data to the backend, thereby analyzing the quality of the athletes' serve reception in real time. If the system waits for a second to give the result after the ping pong ball is hit, the next trajectory will have already occurred, and the user experience will be very poor.
Not only does it have strong computing power and low latency, compared to the past, Pombert’s Hawkeye system can be installed on the center line of the table. On the nearby pole, both the size, power consumption and cost have been significantly reduced - to describe it vividly, in the past, Hawkeye needed a desktop computer-sized device to capture and process data, but now it only needs a mobile phone-sized hardware It can be completed with stronger computing power and cheaper price.
On the Snapdragon Night on the 21st, Pombot’s interaction with world champion Ding Ning also allowed us to discover another singularity of Qualcomm in the field of intelligent robots-Eagle. eye system.
With the help of the Pombert Hawkeye system of Qualcomm RB5 platform, a large amount of data on the swings of professional athletes was collected to establish a depth of the racket receiving the serve. Learn the model and use it to implement the hitting motion of a table tennis ball. Currently, this model can achieve precise control of the flight speed, rotation, landing point, and height of the table tennis ball. The robot can achieve a maximum serving speed of 12m/s and a maximum rotation speed of 80 rpm. And the moving speed of the robot's end can reach 12 meters/second, which is about 3-4 meters/second for many robots of the same type on the market.
In other words, Pombert’s robot has extremely high serving levels and hitting power. In this way, when a professional table tennis team trains athletes to serve, they no longer need to have a full-time athlete coach to play with them for several hours every day, thereby liberating the "sparring coach" from boring, repetitive and huge training volume, allowing them to Do more valuable work. In addition, the Pombert Eagle Eye system can collect all data on the flight trajectory of table tennis balls, including table tennis ball flight speed, landing area, net passing height, etc., and use this to form a personalized training statistical analysis system to provide users with customized Scientific training plan allows users to continuously see their own growth.
In addition to scenarios such as professional team training and beginner teaching and training, Pombot has also used Qualcomm’s technology to create a set of solutions for exams in the B-end market ( Equipped with 3 high frame rate cameras). This set of scene solutions has a recognition rate of 99.99 for various table tennis data.
According to Zhang Haibo, CEO of Pombot, as of now, the national table tennis team training base and many table tennis clubs in Huangshi, Hubei Use Pombot robot solutions for professional training and will be applied to more exam scenarios in the future.
Feedback from the table tennis team is that although the price is on the expensive side, the ball emitted by the anthropomorphic robot can hear the sound of the racket hitting the table tennis ball and see the racket swing. The board shape, the whole process truly restores the table tennis movement. In other words, the robot's serve is close to the level of the national team's coach's serve.
Different from the evaluation of people in the professional field, C-end users think that Pombot robot is "fun and interesting".
Today, in order to further improve the intelligence level of robots, Pombot has also cooperated with the China Table Tennis Academy of Shanghai Institute of Physical Education to develop an intelligent robot coaching system.
A more real smart life
National health is a reflection of the country’s comprehensive strength and a symbol of economic and social development and progress.
As early as 2016, the State Council launched the National Fitness Plan. In recent years, sports and education departments at all levels have continued to increase their support for sports. Yunnan has included sports in the high school entrance examination and raised the score from 50 points to 100 points - the same score as Chinese, mathematics, and English.
In the process of improving the physical fitness of Chinese people, it is crucial to ensure that everyone has enough time and space to carry out various sports every week. As a national sport, although table tennis has a strong mass base in China, it still faces structural challenges such as insufficient venue facilities per capita and improving the technical level of the population participating in table tennis.
Traditional table tennis training and teaching methods rely more on manpower and experience. Although they are still irreplaceable, they lack technological content and are not conducive to liberation. manpower, thereby improving technical levels.