The Five Years Behind a Table Tennis Robot | Mireille El Gheche on TechDrive Zürich

You have probably seen the videos of a robot rallying against a real table tennis player. This episode is about the five years, and the team, behind it.

Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5z

You'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.
In this TechDrive Zürich drive, Mireille El Gheche shares a path that starts with electrical engineering in Lebanon, runs through a master's in radio communication in Paris, a PhD in optimisation, a postdoc in machine learning in Bordeaux and a stint at EPFL, and lands at Sony AI. The recruitment was unusual: nobody would tell her what the project was. They sent her two research papers, one on computer vision and one on table tennis from DeepMind, and let her connect the dots.
She guessed right, joined as a team lead on reinforcement learning, and ended up leading 10 engineers and researchers on a problem that had not been solved before.

The technical heart of the conversation is the gap between a system that works in simulation and a machine that has to survive the real world. Every component worked on its own. Making them work together, in real time, against a fast spinning ball, is where the five years went. Or as Mireille puts it: in the digital world you can reset and restart, but in the real world the physics does not forgive you, and if you are late by a few milliseconds the ball is already gone.

In this episode:
• Getting recruited for a secret project with two research papers and no details
• Why the 80/20 rule breaks down when nobody knows the solution yet
• Research team and engineering team, working in parallel for five years
• The real bottleneck: making every component work together on a real robot
• Why building a robot is fundamentally different from building an AI system
• How the sim-to-real gap narrowed over five years, and why it will never fully close
• What technical leadership actually demands: clarity, trust across disciplines, and making different voices heard
• Going from individual contributor to leading 10 people, and learning to let go
• Where robotics is heading, from care and industry to self-driving cars and drones
• Would she be the patient for a fully autonomous surgical robot?
• Women in Robotics, and why whoever builds the future shapes the future
• Studying engineering in Lebanon in a class that was almost 50/50

About the guest: Mireille El Gheche is a robotics and machine learning researcher who led the reinforcement learning team on Sony AI's table tennis robot project, and is an active participant in the Women in Robotics community.

About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.