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Frame from The Duel: Timo Boll vs. KUKA Robot Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

The Duel: Timo Boll vs. KUKA Robot

KUKA Group
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 7 times, 2015–2026, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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.

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.

“Kuka had this demo years ago” (HN, 2025)

6 citations · 1 critical · Demos · partly dated

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@gregpilling Oct 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Google Canceled the Launch of a Robotic Arm
Read more
I own a Panasonic Robot welding cell, and I keep up with numbers of robots sold like that - I know your numbers are correct. My experience with programming the Panasonic is that there is quite a learning curve to get over, to do the most basic things with it. I think the small numbers of robot adoption could be a reflection on this difficulty, combined with high cost. My cell was $85,000. The robot was a great value at that price though, it generates about $2000 an hour worth of product. Paid for in 40 hours of welding, good for 10,000 more hours before its worn out. The Baxter should prove me wrong, but I think it is just an underperforming platform. The current owners of robot tech would view it as under capable compared to arms from Kuka or Motoman or Panasonic etc. [this video] think the non-robot users, those companies getting a first robot, would find Baxter easy to use but would be less inclined to go buy one; getting a robot is a big step. I have to think that ROS getting better and better, with offline programming, will help adoption. We are at the UNIX terminal phase of computing, or at best we are at a Windows 3.1 level. Nobody has made the iphone of robots yet, one that is very capable yet easy to program. Once we can get to a few swipes to get result, robot placement will increase rapidly. I love how repeatable the result is, and how fast it produces parts. It is about 3x more productive than my most productive welder, with equal or better accuracy (we still hand weld
Example of high-end industrial robot arms
@naveen99 Aug 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”
Is it too much to ask for a humanoid robot to play ping pong with nunchucks as well as Bruce Lee ? Or as good as Tim with paddles ? [link] [this video] Or is this the best we can do in my lifetime : robotic soccer [link]
Robot playing ping pong against a pro
@clouddrover Aug 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Xiaomi beats Tesla to building a working robot
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: [this video] [link]
Kuka robot playing table tennis
@OisinMoran Apr 2026 Pushes back
on HN thread Ping-pong robot Ace makes history by beating top-level human players
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: [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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