PingpongDuo: Agile Humanoid Table Tennis Doubles with Safe Team Coordination

Abstract

Unlike singles, humanoid table tennis doubles requires teammates to strike in strict alternation while sharing a confined workspace. Rapid repositioning can compromise striking accuracy, while uncoordinated teammate movements introduce collision risks. We present PingpongDuo, a hierarchical framework for agile humanoid doubles with safe team coordination. At the team level, a planner jointly selects positioning targets and uses learned risk estimates to filter risky proposals, preferentially preserving the current striker's target. At the individual level, separate footwork and striking skills combine agile movement with precise racket control. The skills are guided by human motion references, including footwork collected from human doubles play, and trained from states produced by one another to support rapid transitions. A racket-arm residual further refines strikes after movement using return feedback from a simulator calibrated with real ball-flight and contact measurements. In simulation, PingpongDuo improves the ball-return success rate by 13.2% over the state-of-the-art baseline, while achieving approximately 2 cm positioning error during clearance. In real-world experiments, a robot completes a 2.15 m clearance-and-recovery cycle in 2.4 s with a peak speed of 2.23 m/s, while two robots sustain more than 10 consecutive strikes in strict alternation.