Reporter Experiences Professional Tennis Serve Speeds Via AI-Powered Robot

A journalist has described the intense experience of facing professional tennis serves recreated by an AI-powered robot, highlighting the speed and precision involved in elite play.

Vodafone's 5G+ Serve technology, demonstrated in Wimbledon Park, uses live data from The Championships to replicate the exact speed, direction, and angle of serves hit on Centre Court. The system transmits this data over a dedicated 5G network to a robotic arm that fires the ball back with remarkable accuracy.

Lettice Bromovsky, a reporter for the Daily Mail, participated in the experience, noting that watching serves from the sofa is vastly different from confronting them directly. "Standing opposite it with a racket in my hand suddenly felt rather less like a fun technology demonstration and rather more like volunteering to stand in front of a cannon," she wrote.

Bromovsky faced simulated serves from top players including Emma Raducanu, Serena Williams, and Jannik Sinner. Her initial attempt to return Raducanu's serve sailed embarrassingly beyond the baseline. She successfully returned a simulated 122mph serve from Serena Williams, describing it as a "startling accuracy."

The most challenging encounter was with a recreated 143mph serve from Jannik Sinner. Bromovsky noted that the ball "doesn't so much travel towards you as materialise in your personal space before you've properly decided where to put your feet." She managed to return Sinner's serve as well, attributing it to "some miracle - or perhaps blind luck."

She emphasized that returning such serves requires more than just quick hands; it demands rapid decision-making and anticipation that professional players possess to an extraordinary degree. "They're already reading body position, racket angle and movement long before the ball has left the strings," Bromovsky observed.

The technology aims to give ordinary individuals a tangible sense of the physical and mental challenges faced by professional athletes. Bromovsky concluded the experience left her with "a considerably healthier respect for everyone competing" at Wimbledon, and a definitive answer to any lingering thoughts about her own potential to handle professional-level serves.