🏓🎾 The 2026 "Hengqin-Macao Cup"​ sports series tipped off on July 11 at Hengqin International Tennis Center! Pickleball champions are already crowned. Running July–August across 5 sports​ (Pickleball, Table Tennis, Badminton, Basketball, Tennis), this series bridges Hengqin & Macao like never before—badminton’s open division makes its historic first move to Macao SAR! 🇲🇴✨ #Sports# #Pickleball# #Badminton# #Tennis# #Basketball# #TableTennis# #GreaterBayArea# #Hengqin# #Macao# #CrossBorder# #Fitness# #Community# #Events# #Summer2026# 🔗 Full story:

NEW ROBOT SKILL: Your humanoid can now play table tennis with you! It involves @TaouHuang, @junli_r84995, @kai_zhangjojo, @sephy_li, @ilnehc, and others. Called SMASH, it lets a Unitree G1 humanoid play table tennis from its own onboard cameras, with a single whole-body RL policy (no split upper/lower body). A head-mounted ZED X stereo camera tracks the incoming ball at 60 Hz. A downward-tilted ZED X Mini localizes the robot at 120 Hz by reading seven AprilTags placed on the table, and an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter with a quadratic-drag ball-flight model fuses the two async streams into a joint estimate of ball state and robot pose at over 50 Hz. The policy is trained on a strike library of 400 real motion-capture demonstrations expanded by a motion VAE to about 5,000 clips, and produces coordinated full-body shots including smashes and low crouching returns. It replaces prior table-tennis humanoids that split upper and lower-body control and depended on external sensing. "No external cameras" does not mean no instrumentation: self-pose still depends on seven AprilTags on the table. The robot carries the cameras, but the downward ZED X Mini localizes it at 120 Hz by reading those printed fiducials (AprilTag plus PnP-RANSAC). The infrastructure moved from active (external cameras or mocap) to passive (printed tags) -> it did not disappear, so "onboard only" is softer than it first sounds. The honest return rate is 59.7 percent, not the headline 93.7. Over a 50-minute, 642-launch run, 93.7 percent is the contact rate, but 34.0 percent is contact-only, so about 40 percent of contacts do not come back over the net, successful returns are 59.7 percent. The backhand is the clear weak side: 38.9 percent return versus 66.7 forehand, with 52.1 percent of backhand contacts failing to return. The impressive number is contact; the useful number is return. In simulation it ties the HITTER baseline on success (86.38 vs 86.63). Its measurable edges are motion quality (whole-body MPJPE 75.0 vs 100.1) and the real-world capability HITTER lacks: consecutive rallies outdoors on onboard sensing alone. The follow-up beats the benchmark by moving to onboard egocentric vision, not by scoring higher on the shared metric. Using the head ZED X for pose instead of the downward ZED X Mini drops returns from 13/20 to 8/20; removing the adaptive observation-noise scaling drops to 7/20; and ablating the YOLO detector with a yellow distractor present takes detection to 0/20. The self-pose channel, not just ball tracking, is what makes returns land. One caveat: no measured smash, ball, or paddle speed appears anywhere, so "explosive whole-body smashes" is qualitative and the agility claim is unquantified in velocity terms. Besides, the project's claim "100-plus consecutive rallies" is marketing: the paper counts 642 ball launches with randomized landings, not 642 completed rallies.

On July 27, in the semifinals of the Jiangsu Province Selection Competition for the 2026 Chinese Table Tennis Association National Youth and Junior Training Team, an incident of on-court violence occurred. After the match ended, the winning side took the initiative to step forward and shake hands with the losing side, but the losing athlete Cao Yankai lost emotional control, not only refusing the handshake but also swinging fists to fiercely strike and kicking the opponent. Subsequently, the official announcement of the handling results: All results of this athlete in the current competition are canceled, and a one-year suspension from table tennis events within Jiangsu Province is imposed.

Chinese paddlers Wang Manyu, Wang Yidi and Kuai Man advanced to the women's singles semifinals at the World Table Tennis (#WTT#) Europe Smash Sweden on Saturday. Top seed Wang Manyu defeated Chinese Taipei's Peng Yu-Han 4-1 in the quarterfinals. Looking ahead to the semifinals, Wang said she expected a tougher opponent and would make sure she was fully prepared and ready to "play more freely and fight for every point."