# Athletic Mobile Manipulator System for Robotic Wheelchair Tennis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02517 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02517/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BOSS: Benchmark for Observation Space Shift in Long-Horizon Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15679/) (2025)
- [Multi-Camera Asynchronous Ball Localization and Trajectory Prediction with Factor Graphs and Human Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17185/) (2024)
- [Bridging the gap between Learning-to-plan, Motion Primitives and Safe Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14063/) (2024)
- [Integrating Learning-Based Manipulation and Physics-Based Locomotion for Whole-Body Badminton Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17771/) (2025)
- [Humanoid Whole-Body Badminton via an Annealed Reinforcement Learning Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11218/) (2025)
- [A Retrospective on the Robot Air Hockey Challenge: Benchmarking Robust, Reliable, and Safe Learning Techniques for Real-world Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05718/) (2024)
- [Towards Learning Scalable Agile Dynamic Motion Planning for Robosoccer Teams with Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05526/) (2025)
- [Towards Professional Tennis Styles for Humanoid Robots with Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20087/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Athletics are a quintessential and universal expression of humanity. From French monks who in the 12th century invented jeu de paume, the precursor to modern lawn tennis, back to the K'iche' people who played the Maya Ballgame as a form of religious expression over three thousand years ago, humans have sought to train their minds and bodies to excel in sporting contests. Advances in robotics are opening up the possibility of robots in sports. Yet, key challenges remain, as most prior works in robotics for sports are limited to pristine sensing environments, do not require significant force generation, or are on miniaturized scales unsuited for joint human-robot play. In this paper, we propose the first open-source, autonomous robot for playing regulation wheelchair tennis. We demonstrate the performance of our full-stack system in executing ground strokes and evaluate each of the system's hardware and software components. The goal of this paper is to (1) inspire more research in human-scale robot athletics and (2) establish the first baseline for a reproducible wheelchair tennis robot for regulation singles play. Our paper contributes to the science of systems design and poses a set of key challenges for the robotics community to address in striving towards robots that can match human capabilities in sports.