Tennis Robot: From Lacoste's Machine to ABB Arms

A tennis robot will feed you the same backhand fifty times without getting bored, and the newest ones drive around the court on their own. This post follows the idea from hitting partners and club coaches with baskets of balls to René Lacoste's ball-throwing machine of 1928 and the Prince machines of the 1970s, and then to the AI robots that Acemate, Tenniix and Lumistar brought out in 2026. After that it looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200, the GoFa cobot and the Flexley Mover could fit, and at the problems that keep robot practice partners rare.

Tim Henman tosses the ball to serve on grass at Wimbledon in 2005. Photo: Spiralz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From hitting partners to Lacoste's ball-throwing machine

For most of tennis history, practice meant another person. Club players rallied with friends, and professionals hired coaches or hitting partners who stood across the net and fed ball after ball from a basket. A good feeder costs money and gets tired, and even a patient one cannot send the exact same ball for an hour. Juniors needed hundreds of forehands in a session to groove a stroke, and few clubs had the people to supply them. Top players of the 1920s and 1930s trained this way too, with long sessions on court against whoever was willing to hit with them.

L. Bennett returns a ball on a Brisbane court in 1939, when practice meant a human partner. Photo: State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

One of those players built a machine to do the feeding. René Lacoste, the French champion whose steady, error-free baseline game earned him the nickname "the Tennis Machine", was also an inventor, and in 1928 he came up with a device for throwing tennis balls. Press photographs dated 21 March 1928 show it being tested at the tennis club in Asnières, near Paris. The machine sat on a wheeled cart with a handle so it could be pushed into place, and a man worked it from behind while a player waited across the net. Decades later Lacoste also invented the steel racket that Wilson sold as the T2000.

René Lacoste beside a ball-throwing machine at the Asnières tennis club, March 1928. Photo: Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Ball machines became a real product in the 1970s. Robert H. McClure of Princeton, New Jersey, founded Prince in 1970 to make tennis ball machines. One customer was Howard Head, the engineer behind Head skis, who had taken up tennis and was unhappy with how his machine worked. He set about improving it and ended up buying the company, which later became famous for his oversized racket. Over the following decades ball machines gained oscillation, spin settings, timers and remote controls, and eventually phone apps, but they still sat in one spot and fired from there.

The 1928 machine feeding balls to a player across the net at Asnières while onlookers watch. Photo: Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

AI tennis robots that move and return the ball

The newest machines drive around and react to your shots. At IFA 2026 in Berlin on 3 September, Acemate launched the S10 Pro, which it calls an AI tennis robot. Dual 4K binocular cameras track the ball and the robot moves on omnidirectional wheels. In Rally Mode it catches in-bounds shots and returns the ball from where it landed. Acemate quotes a top speed of 75 mph (120 km/h), up from 60 mph on the first S10, a hopper for 100 balls and up to five hours of running time. Its Battle Mode plays points against you in one of four styles and keeps score.

Wang Qiang plays against the Tenniix ULTRA MAX robot at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals in Shenzhen, September 2026. Photo: Tenniix via PR Newswire

On 23 September 2026, at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals in Shenzhen, Tenniix showed ULTRA MAX, built with LimX Dynamics on that company's TRON 2 wheeled-leg platform. It rallied with Chinese player Wang Qiang, tracking spin and landing points and feeding from heights between 1.2 and 1.6 metres. Lumistar went for a lighter machine. Its Tero follows the player by way of a wristband, takes voice commands, has 238 drills and fires balls at up to 140 km/h, for $1,099. Lumistar showed it in New York during the US Open and reported raising $10 million in September.

Coco Gauff serves during practice at the 2023 US Open, the event where Lumistar later showed its Tero machine. Photo: Amaury Laporte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not make a tennis robot, and none of these products use ABB hardware. Some jobs around this market do suit its robots. A compact arm like the IRB 1200 repeats the same motion thousands of times, so a lab could use one to swing rackets or test strings and balls under identical conditions. The GoFa CRB 15000 cobot has torque sensors in its joints and stops when it feels contact, which matters when people are close by. Engineers would plan a cell like that in RobotStudio before buying anything. Both are possibilities; neither exists as a tennis project today.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

What a robot hitting partner still has to learn

At home and in clubs, the next few years will probably bring cheaper versions of the Acemate and Tero ideas: a mobile machine that tracks the ball with cameras, adjusts its feed to how well you hit, and sends a report to your phone. Many players already own an older static ball machine, so a robot has to earn its higher price. Picking up balls is a separate job with its own robots, covered in our post on the tennis ball collecting robot. Table tennis went down a similar path earlier, as described in our post on table tennis robots.

Moving a GoFa arm by hand; torque sensors in its joints let it feel contact. Photo: ABB

Once the machine moves, safety becomes the hard part. A robot driving along the baseline while a player sprints for a drop shot has to see the person and slow down or stop, and a ball fired at 120 km/h from close range can hurt. Factories handle similar risks with speed and separation monitoring, such as ABB's SafeMove, and with mobile robots that map their surroundings as they go. ABB's Flexley Mover P604, for example, finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Getting that level of safety into a consumer product that sells for a few thousand dollars is still an open problem.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, a mobile robot that finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Then there is the tennis itself. A coach watches a student's footwork and grip and explains what went wrong, and no current robot does that well. Machines are good at volume and repetition, and they now measure speed, spin and placement, but they cannot yet teach feel. Courts are also messy, with wind, low sun, wet clay and stray balls everywhere. The likely mix is a moving robot for drills and rallies and a human coach for technique, while in factories and test labs industrial arms such as ABB's test the rackets and balls that players end up using.

A club player hits a high forehand during a training session on a hard court. Photo: Kalvarez2403 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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