English

CyboRacket: A Perception-to-Action Framework for Humanoid Racket Sports

Robotics 2026-03-17 v1

Abstract

Dynamic ball-interaction tasks remain challenging for robots because they require tight perception-action coupling under limited reaction time. This challenge is especially pronounced in humanoid racket sports, where successful interception depends on accurate visual tracking, trajectory prediction, coordinated stepping, and stable whole-body striking. Existing robotic racket-sport systems often rely on external motion capture for state estimation or on task-specific low-level controllers that must be retrained across tasks and platforms. We present CyboRacket, a hierarchical perception-to-action framework for humanoid racket sports that integrates onboard visual perception, physics-based trajectory prediction, and large-scale pre-trained whole-body control. The framework uses onboard cameras to track the incoming object, predicts its future trajectory, and converts the estimated interception state into target end-effector and base-motion commands for whole-body execution by SONIC on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. We evaluate the proposed framework in a vision-based humanoid tennis-hitting task. Experimental results demonstrate real-time visual tracking, trajectory prediction, and successful striking using purely onboard sensing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14605,
  title  = {CyboRacket: A Perception-to-Action Framework for Humanoid Racket Sports},
  author = {Peng Ren and Chuan Qi and Haoyang Ge and Qiyuan Su and Xuguo He and Cong Huang and Pei Chi and Jiang Zhao and Kai Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14605},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:21:04.081Z