Sony's new robot has a killer backhand

PLUS: Ukraine's war robot revolution

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Joey Liu, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
April 23, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Table tennis has long been robotics’ unsolvable puzzle — a blurring ball, invisible spin, decisions that unfold in milliseconds.

Sony’s Ace just solved it, with an industrial arm that now beats Olympic-level players. Compared to humanoids winning marathons, Ace is doing something even harder: reading physics in real time and acting on it, in a perceptual-motor loop with implications far beyond ping-pong.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Sony’s robot just beat elite ping-pong players

  • Robots are taking over Ukraine’s front lines

  • Reliable Robotics’ $1B bet on robot pilots

  • MIT spinout is building homes with robot arms

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SONY

Image source: Sony

The Rundown: Ace, Sony’s AI table-tennis robot, is the first machine to defeat elite human players on a full-size court — tracking spin, predicting trajectories, and swinging an industrial arm in the same instant.

The details:

  • The system uses 9 high-speed cameras to triangulate the ball in 3D while three gaze-control rigs zoom in on the logo mid-flight to read its spin axis in real time.

  • End-to-end, Ace reacts in 20 ms, around 10x faster than a human, by feeding that spin and trajectory data straight into a deep reinforcement learning policy.

  • The system was trained entirely in simulation, playing against itself for ~3K hours with no human demos before transferring to an eight-joint industrial arm.

  • By December, Ace was beating professionals, including an unreturnable backspin shot that stumped 1992 Olympian Kinjiro Nakamura courtside.

Why it matters: Table tennis is brutal for robots with its fast ball, unpredictable spin, and millisecond decisions. Ace cracked that loop, and the underlying architecture — high-speed perception fused with learned motor policy — is exactly what robotics needs for higher-stakes environments beyond the ping-pong table.

DEFENSE ROBOTS

Image source: Reve AI / The Rundown

The Rundown: Ukraine’s ground war is going robotic. Drones and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have become a standard-issue tactical asset in 12 months — and Kyiv is now treating them as a template for how to fight short on soldiers, Politico reports.

The details:

  • Ukraine’s Defense Ministry says ground robots carried out more than 9K missions in March, and nearly 24,500 in the first three months of 2026.

  • Kyiv plans to contract around 25K ground robots in the first half of 2026, with an explicit goal of automating 100% of frontline logistics.

  • In 2025, Ukrainian forces said a single machine-gun-armed UGV held a frontline position for 45 days, undergoing maintenance and reloading every 48 hours.

  • The 3rd Assault Brigade reportedly moved more than 200 tonnes of supplies in a single month via UGVs, equivalent to 10K soldiers each carrying 20 kg.

Why it matters: With 280 companies now reportedly building UGVs, Ukraine is scaling what aerial drones demonstrated: keep humans back, let machines take the risk. Russia is adapting quickly, developing swarm models and UGVs that deploy FPV drones, turning the front into a real-time testbed for robotic warfare.

RELIABLE ROBOTICS

Image source: Reliable Robotics

The Rundown: Reliable Robotics, a Mountain View-based autonomous flight startup led by a SpaceX alum, just raised $160M in new funding at a near-$1B valuation to accelerate development and FAA certification of its uncrewed flight system.

The details:

  • The startup is building a “robot pilot” stack that lets aircraft like the Cessna Caravan taxi, take off, cruise, and land under continuous software control.

  • Its autonomous system fuses high‑precision navigation, flight controls, and fail‑operational automation so the plane can fly gate‑to‑gate.

  • Founded in 2017 by SpaceX veteran Robert Rose, the company says it is applying software-first, aerospace-grade rigor to FAA-certified aviation.

  • In 2023, it completed an FAA-approved uncrewed Caravan cargo flight, operated remotely from a control room 50 miles away.

Why it matters: The robot pilot market is real now, and this round keeps Reliable in a tight race with Merlin Labs and Xwing to certify uncrewed cargo ops on existing airframes, skipping the eVTOL speculation entirely. If FAA approval comes through, it’ll be a big win for Reliable and a regulatory template for pilotless cargo aviation.

REFRAME SYSTEMS

Image source: Reframe Systems

The Rundown: America’s housing shortage has a labor problem, and an MIT spinout thinks robots stationed close to high-demand markets can help close the gap faster and cleaner than traditional construction ever could.

The details:

  • Reframe Systems is using compact robotic microfactories to prefabricate modular home panels near high-demand markets like Greater Boston.

  • Industrial robot arms handle wall and ceiling framing inside a local microfactory, while human crews finish wiring, plumbing, and on-site assembly.

  • Completed homes have already gone up in Arlington and Somerville, Mass., with a second microfactory in southern California to support wildfire rebuilding.

  • The firm says that standardized modular panels cut jobsite waste, and finished homes are designed to be energy-efficient and solar-ready.

Why it matters: The U.S. construction sector is short on workers and long on inefficiency, a combination that keeps housing expensive and carbon-intensive. Reframe bets that moving fabrication off-site and closer to demand can compress timelines, cut emissions, and sidestep the chaos that plagues traditional builds.

QUICK HITS

Tesla said it is starting work in Q2 on a Fremont Optimus line targeting 1M robots a year — with a next‑gen, 10M‑per‑year factory at Giga Texas also in the pipeline.

Korean robotics firm ROBOTIS unveiled AI Sapiens, a 130cm-tall, 34kg open-source humanoid positioned as a lower-cost research rival to Unitree’s G1 and R1.

Tesla dropped five patents that blueprint the tendon‑driven Optimus hand and forearm, from a gearless wrist to concentric forearm actuators.

Sudo emerged from stealth with R1, a new robot trained fully in simulation that achieves about 98% first‑try grasp success on previously unseen objects.

U.S. startup Agility Robotics trained its Digit humanoid to repeatedly deadlift 65 lb. with controlled precision in the lab.

Vancouver-based A&K Robotics raised $5.8M in Series A funding to scale deployment of its self-driving mobility pods in airports.

The Pentagon’s new budget proposal includes about $54B to expand drone use, an amount reportedly larger than the entire annual military spending of most countries.

Coco Robotics launched its zero-emission sidewalk delivery robots in downtown San Jose, California, in partnership with Uber Eats.

VinGroup’s robotics arm, VinDynamics, and Germany’s Schaeffler signed a deal to co-develop high-demand humanoid parts like actuators, motors, and gear systems.

Swiss startup Bubble Robotics raised a $5M pre-seed round to deploy autonomous underwater robot “BubbleBots” for long-duration inspection of offshore infrastructure.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team