The CoachAI Badminton Environment: Bridging the Gap Between a Reinforcement Learning Environment and Real-World Badminton Games

Abstract

We present the CoachAI Badminton Environment, a reinforcement learning (RL) environment tailored for AI-driven sports analytics. In contrast to traditional environments using rule-based opponents or simplistic physics-based randomness, our environment integrates authentic opponent AIs and realistic randomness derived from real-world matches data to bridge the performance gap encountered in real-game deployments. This novel feature enables RL agents to seamlessly adapt to genuine scenarios. The CoachAI Badminton Environment empowers researchers to validate strategies in intricate real-world settings, offering: i) Realistic opponent simulation for RL training; ii) Visualizations for evaluation; and iii) Performance benchmarks for assessing agent capabilities. By bridging the RL environment with actual badminton games, our environment is able to advance the discovery of winning strategies for players. Our code is available at https://github.com/wywyWang/CoachAI-Projects/tree/main/Strategic%20Environment.