At CES 2018 in Las Vegas, we faced off with Omron’s Forpheus, a robot that learns from your every move and expression, and plays harder as you get better.
“This is Forpheus. It’s a robotic ping-pong table that teaches you how to play. It’s made by Omron, and it’s not going to get to consumers, but it’s purely to showcase their main technologies. And of course, there’s the obvious, there’s the robotics Behind all this. The robotic arm and the robot here in the background that’s feeding it the balls. But, there’s also some artificial intelligence because, as Andy’s playing, it can detect his skill set and adapt accordingly. It’s also got And some face detecting cameras here on the top that are reading his facial features to see how his stress level is and adapting accordingly. So it has got a lot of artificial intelligence and as he gets better, the robot gets harder. So Andy is pretty much a pro at this level and I have not had a lot of experience playing ping pong so let’s see if it can Teach me how to play, and if it can teach me, it can pretty much teach anybody. Here goes.”
“I think I’ve stumped a robot. I can’t learn. And once a player is done it displays all the information up here on the screen including the photographs that were taken by the cameras. And I think I’m beyond any help at this time but I did feel myself getting a little bit better. So the AI on this machine definitely does work.”