I'm still waiting for the new Amicus to be made available here in the UK, but a friend of mine recently leant me his robot so that I could test it out on my table at home. Just for clarity, my friend’s robot is not an Amicus but rather a cheaper Chinese make that I haven’t heard of before. This model has two heads (rather than the three the Amicus has) which regulate topspin and backspin and each wheel has speed settings from 0-9 (0 means the wheel is turned off and 9 is it’s running at its fastest).
After setting it up, I’ve found it difficult to get it to produce a ball that bounces as if it would from a human player. Or in other words, the bounce feels unrealistic. To give you an example, if I want a top-spin ball, I set the speed of the top wheel to say 3 and bottom wheel to 0, the ball just fires into the net. In order to get the ball to go over the net, I have to set the bottom wheel speed to 1. This means that the ball produced has less top-spin on it as the bottom wheel is counter-acting the speed of the top wheel and thus, a more floating ball is produced. Of course, I can turn up the speed of the top wheel to produce more top-spin, but this just makes the balls fire faster at me, rather than producing a slow top-spin shot.
After practicing with this Chinese robot for a weekend, I played a league match the following week and I really struggled to get the ball on the table. I can only put this down to the fact that the robot has been giving me float balls and when I warmed up against a real player, I was over-hitting the ball and my timing was completely out.
I know I’ve waffled a bit, but this does lead me to my question about the Amicus and that is “does the Amicus have a "natural" feel to the balls it produces?”. In other words, does it fire out balls that bounce as if they have been hit by a real person, or is this artificial feeling just part of using a robot?
Many thanks
