Watch as a ROBOT tennis player zips around the court ahead of Wimbledon

The moment tennis fans have been waiting for is almost finally here, with the Wimbledon Championships kicking off next week.

This year’s tournament will see the likes of Petra Kvitova, Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz take to the grass.

But in the near future, they may face fierce competition from an unlikely new contender: a robot.

Georgia Tech scientists have developed a new robot called ESTHER (Experimental Sport Tennis Wheelchair Robot), which can drive around the court and even return human shots.

The team believes the bot could serve as a training partner for professional players in the future, removing the psychological pressure of training against another human.

The bot is the brainchild of Georgia Tech’s Matthew Gombolay, an associate professor of robotics in the School of Interactive Computing.

He wanted to develop a better training challenge than a stationary ball feeder, one that would act as an always available sparring partner or even team up in doubles.

The result is ESTHER, a modified wheelchair tennis chair that can race for balls at 10 meters per second – and possibly outperform a human being.

Mr Gombolay explains: ‘The wheelchair has the ability to move quickly around the field and get into position to make a ground stroke.

ESTHER’s high-torque motors can exceed the average acceleration of a tennis player, suggesting that it may be possible to outsmart human opponents in future design iterations.

“ESTHER can move up to six feet after the ball is launched to make a successful return, which is comparable to the maximum distance human players travel between 80 percent of shots.”

The device is named in homage to noted wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer, who held the world No. 1 ranking in women’s wheelchair tennis from 1999 until her retirement in 2013.

ESTHER can move up to six feet after the ball is launched to make a successful return, which is comparable to the maximum distance human players travel between 80 percent of shots

ESTHER is now being developed to further simulate the experience of playing against a highly skilled opponent

In collaboration with more than 20 students, Gombolay wrote a paper on building ESTHER, which was accepted for publication in the Automation Letters (IEEE RA-L) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Robotics & Automation Society.

The team placed a network of high-resolution cameras around a tennis court and used computer vision algorithms to help ESTHER spot an incoming tennis ball.

Using cameras from different angles, they were able to triangulate where the ball is in space and relay this information to ESTHER.

The team achieved a breakthrough when they successfully and consistently programmed ESTHER to locate the tennis ball approaching and return a ball.

“It took us about two years to get to that point because no one has done this before,” Gombolay said. “We built this from the ground up. Developing that ability was really exciting.”

ESTHER is now being developed to further simulate the experience of playing against a highly skilled opponent.

Mr. Gombolay added: “ESTHER opens up numerous exciting research opportunities in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, kinodynamic planning, human-robot collaboration and much more.

“What really excites me is that it could be a partner for me one day. It could also be my opponent. It can help me train. I could make it look like he’s the only one I always lose to because he can exploit this weakness in my game.

“Training against an opponent is psychologically more stressful. By getting closer to simulating real race conditions, you can improve performance.”