Wimbledon 2026 is featuring two different robots designed to play tennis. One is a machine that shoots balls at you for practice. The other is a humanoid robot — a machine shaped like a person — that can return your serve.

Galbot Robotics built the humanoid robot. It returns tennis serves with 96% accuracy, according to the Daily Express Sport. That means it sends the ball back to the server most of the time. Tennibot Inc. made the ball machine, called the Partner V2, which is designed to help players train, per MassRobotics.

To understand how good these robots are, you need to know how fast the best human players serve. Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, a French tennis player who is 6'8" tall, hit a serve at 153 miles per hour at Wimbledon 2025. That's the fastest serve ever recorded at the All England Club, according to ESPN. For context: most professional tennis players serve around 100 to 120 mph. Perricard's serve has become the standard people use to measure whether these robots are actually impressive.

The two robots do different jobs. The Partner V2 is a ball machine. It launches balls at you so you can practice alone, without needing another person or a coach. It uses AI to adjust the spin and direction of the balls, and it can log your practice sessions on an app. This type of machine already exists and sells well to clubs and training academies.

The Galbot humanoid robot is something new. To return a serve, a robot has to watch the ball coming at it in real time, move its arms and legs in coordination with each other, and shift its weight in fractions of a second. A 96% return rate would place it above the level of typical amateur players. But here's what matters: when robots are demonstrated, they often practice in perfect conditions — the same serve speed over and over, or easier shots — rather than the messy reality of an actual match. The sources don't explain exactly how they measured that 96%.

These two robots together show that sports robotics has reached a turning point. Ball machines for training are already a real business and growing. Humanoid robots that can actually play tennis are still mostly demonstrations. The gap between "this works in a demo" and "this is ready to use" has been shrinking faster than tennis organizations have been writing rules for how to use these machines.

Wimbledon matters more than a typical tech showcase. The All England Club has more professional players, coaches, and equipment companies gathered in one place than anywhere else in tennis. Showing off robots there gets much more attention than showing them at a trade show. Galbot is saying its robot can handle the fastest serves in the sport — not that it's a fun experiment, but that it's a real training tool.

A big question remains unanswered: does a robot that can return 96% of serves at a certain speed actually help a professional tennis player get better? Top players usually practice against partners who play like their upcoming opponents — returning specific shots and patterns, not just speed. We don't know yet if Galbot's robot can learn and mimic those patterns well enough to replace a real sparring partner. That information isn't public yet.

What's clear is that this technology is no longer experimental. Two robots built by real companies are being shown at tennis's biggest event, measured against serve speeds that represent the absolute limit of what human bodies can do. The jump from "can return a serve" to "can coach a professional" is still a long one. But now you can actually measure the distance.