The Consumer Technology Association named its CES Innovation Awards 2027 honorees today, and Pongbot Limited made the list. Its Aura, an 8.9 kg ball machine that trains tennis, pickleball and padel from a single unit, is a 2027 Honoree in the Sports & Fitness category, per the program’s official directory. The association runs the awards alongside CES, which takes over Las Vegas from January 6 to 9.
The entry describes Aura as the first ultra-light AI coaching robot for multi-sport athletes, delivering real-time analysis and personalized coaching across all three sports. It also credits the machine with built-in drills, customized training programs and voice-guided coaching tips during play, all running on a dedicated AI chip.
Price: $799.99
Regular Price: $1,699.99
You Save: $900.00 (53%)
Where to buy: Pongbot
One machine, three sports
Most ball machines commit to one sport and stay there for their whole product life. Aura ships with a single sport activated, tennis, pickleball or padel, chosen by the buyer at setup, and sells the others through Sport Unlock Cards, while the 3-in-1 versions carry all three from day one. Feeds run up to 100 km/h with spin up to 60 rps, and the hopper swallows 120 tennis balls, 100 pickleballs or 120 padel balls before it needs a refill.
Portability ties the pitch together. At 8.9 kg (19.6 lb), the machine hangs off a shoulder strap and rides to the court like a racket bag, and its battery runs five hours on a charge and swaps out when it dies, no cart or second pair of hands required.
Charging runs over USB-C, cable included, and Pongbot recommends a 60W or stronger adapter from your own drawer.
The S in Aura S stands for the Spotter, a camera module that mounts on top of the machine and turns a ball feeder into something closer to a coach. Its dual cameras shoot at 120 frames per second across a 180-degree field of view, tracking every shot and movement as it happens. The AI Coach behind it trained on more than 100,000 data points, per Pongbot, and it speaks its corrections out loud during the session.
Two software features carry the rest of the coaching load. Match Challenge ingests match footage you upload and rebuilds the rallies in it as drills, so practice starts resembling the points you actually play, not generic feeds set by someone else. PONG.AI needs no Spotter at all and builds sessions from spoken requests.
Every session lands in the Aura app as a report. Shot data, landing patterns and consistency sit in a daily history, with monthly trends on top.
Underneath the coaching sits a library of 10,000-plus drills across the three sports. Custom Drill mode hands over the levers, spin type, speed, depth and feed frequency, and with the Spotter fitted, Recovery Trigger times each feed to your recovery position. Programs scale to competitive training.
Inside Pongbot’s own range, Aura is the portable branch, not the flagship. The Pace S Pro stays the pro machine, with 100Hz tracking, 130 km/h feeds and eight-plus hours of battery, against Aura’s 60Hz tracking and five-hour swaps.
The category around it
Sports & Fitness is one of 37 categories in the 2027 program, and its Best of Innovation designation went to CARRY, a movable basketball training robot from Lumistar (Shanghai) Robotics Technology. CTA says this year’s entries came in at close to 4,000 submissions. Additional honorees get announced on January 4, two days before CES 2027 opens in Las Vegas. A basketball robot took the top honor in the category where Aura placed.
An Honoree designation is not a nomination or a shortlist spot. Entries are scored by a panel of industry judges, and products that clear the program’s scoring threshold in their category earn the title, with Best of Innovation reserved for the highest scorer in each group. Aura’s listing sits in the full directory on CTA’s site, alongside the other Sports & Fitness honorees. That scoring is what separates the title from a simple entry.
It’s also not this machine’s first show season. The Aura line collected a run of CES 2026 awards back in January, including a Best of CES nod from this site, and Pongbot’s store page still wears those badges. A second straight January with an award attached gives the young line a running start before the doors even open.
We have followed the Aura since its launch last May, and the range runs four deep. The base Aura sells for $599.99 and the Aura S for $799.99, with the 3-in-1 versions at $649.99 and $849.99, all inside a Black Friday sale that runs through December 6. Our November walkthrough of that sale breaks down what each adds, and Pongbot says orders ship about two weeks after confirmation, first come, first served, and returns run free inside 30 days.
Price: $799.99
Regular Price: $1,699.99
You Save: $900.00 (53%)
Where to buy: Pongbot
Come January, Aura joins the Sports & Fitness class on the CES floor. For a line launched in May, that is a solid marker heading into the biggest week in consumer tech.
