T2Snaker: a Robotic Coach for Table Tennis

EasyChair Preprint 7642

Abstract

The restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected all aspects of daily life, especially human contact. Accordingly, an essential aspect of human contact is for training and skill acquisition, which is difficult to conduct under such restrictions. Therefore, we developed T2Snaker, a table tennis training system that comprises a robotic appendage to guide user’s hand movements within a VR environment. T2Snaker’s novelty lies in its flexibility to guide users movements, yet as it is not directly attached to the user’s limbs, it does not impose restrictions on their movements like traditional exoskeleton systems. We explain the implementation specifics of T2Snaker and discuss its preliminary evaluation that focused on table-tennis skill acquisition. The results show that T2Snaker has high potential in skill acquisition, and users praised is ability to guide their movements and proposed various potential application domains. We discuss some design insights based on our work and present future research directions.

Keyphrases: Appendages, Augmentation, Education, Robotic, Serpentine, Snake, VR, table tennis

@booklet{EasyChair:7642,
  author    = {Kodai Fuchino and Mohammed Al-Sada and Tamon Miyake and Tatsuo Nakajima},
  title     = {T2Snaker: a Robotic Coach for Table Tennis},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 7642},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}