Practicing at home against a Power Pong Omega Robot helped Divyanshi to gain control
Bringing a table tennis board home during the COVID-19 phase probably became the most valuable investment, as Divyanshi defeated three Chinese players on the way to winning India’s first gold medal in 36 years at the Asian Youth Table Tennis Championships. India won a gold medal at the under-15 event in 1989, when the tournament was held in New Delhi. On Tuesday in Tashkent, the paddler from Kandivali in Mumbai defeated China’s Zhu Qihi 4-2 in the final to continue her rapid rise in the sport. The gold medal comes a few months after Divyanshi was thrown at the deep end in Chennai, where she made her senior debut at the WTT Star Contender event at the age of 14. In the first round, she defeated World No.64 and Olympian Giorgia Piccolin of Italy. She also won a doubles silver medal at the 2023 ITTF World Youth Championships, along with WTT Contender Youth titles at under-13, under-15, and under-17 categories. After the TT board arrived at her home, Divyangshi used to practice for nearly five hours every day with her sister and father. But at her first Nationals, Divyanshi lost early, prompting her father to try to find out what went wrong. He was told that it would take 3-4 years for his daughter to reach an elite level. “When she lost in qualifying, I asked the coach how we could get better. I was told that it would take a long time, and things don’t move so fast. I couldn’t digest this and took matters into my own hands,” says Rahul Bhowmick, her father, while speaking to the Indian Express. Rahul, who is the regional CEO of ISS Global Forwarding, decided to bring a Power Pong Omega Robot home to help develop Divyanshi’s game. “One of the things that I noticed in the success of Chinese paddlers was their ball control. So, we used the robot to work on specific scenarios where she was having trouble. You can program the robot to a high-spin, high-loop setting and then hit thousands of such balls in practice. The key was to repeat it time and again until she perfected it,” explained Rahul.
China launches its first humanoid robot soccer league in Beijing
To make the game more entertaining and create more fun, China launched the first humanoid robot soccer league in Beijing. On June 28, 2025, the final of the 2025 RoBo League Robot Football Tournament took place in Beijing. The event served as the first trial match for the upcoming 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games and marked China’s first-ever fully autonomous 3-on-3 AI robot football competition. The championship went to the THU Robotics team from Tsinghua University, with second place going to China Agricultural University’s Mountain Sea team. The Blaze team from Beijing Information Science and Technology University and the Power team from the Future Laboratory, Tsinghua University shared third place. The league has won over fans thanks to its unique combination of sports and AI technology. Many spectators at the venue are robotics enthusiasts coming for the charm of cutting-edge technologies. According to Bian Yuansong, chairman of Shangyicheng Group, which operates the event, RoBoLeague serves as a testing ground for frontier technologies such as bipedal dynamic balancing and multi-agent collaborative decision-making. The event not only provides crucial technical validation for the football segment of future humanoid robot games but also lays a solid foundation for enhancing the sensitivity of embodied robots. “The technologies showcased during the competition will be rapidly translated into real-world applications, directly benefiting industrial production and everyday life,” Bian noted. He added that the group plans to develop a series of robot competition IPs—including a robot half-marathon and RoBo League—to promote the real-world application and development of humanoid robotics across diverse scenarios.
