Ducky was our 2025-26 Outreach robot that we used to show off at many outreach events. Ducky had a fun, cool functionality of rapid fire shooting ping-pong balls. This made the robot a hit when we took it to elementary or middle schools to teach the younger kids about STEM and robotics.

Our goal was to create an easy to control and fun to play with outreach robot for our outreach events. In past years, we would take our competition robot to outreach events to show off. The problem was, the robots were complicated to manipulate and prone to damage with a kid driving. This meant we needed to eliminate the use of our competition robots and develop a quick and easy outreach robot.

We did a lot of research on what would be the most fun to have at an outreach event. We found that in order to keep the kids locked in on the presentation, we would need a catchy name and function. A shooting robot seemed to be the most catchy, where a pick and place robot seemed boring to drive. So, we decided to create a ping pong ball launcher with easy and quick materials.

First, we designed the slim drivebase. Since we were only shooting ping pong balls, we could make the robot smaller for less damage to the surrounding area and easier mobility from place to place. In order to keep the robot simple, I designed a tank drive with three wheels belted together and powered by used motors. Next, we saved room for a large hopper by making a steep intake ramp that carried the ping pong balls very high with not much depth. Then, we made a steady sloped hopper for natural descesion into the shooter channel. Finally, we mounted a high shooter powered by a bevel geared motor on top of the horizontal channel. In order to feed the balls into the shooter, we had a servo powered roller that would continuously rotate to get the balls to the needed height.

Ducky was a major hit in all the outreach we attended. The kids loved the functionality of "Ping Pong Trainer", though it was a bit buggy. Some of the problems we had included two balls getting stuck at the entrance to the shooter channel, which could only be fixed with a firm jolt of the robot. Next, the feeder wheel didn't actually feed the balls high enough to the shooter, so we needed another ball behind to help push it up and shoot. Though it had bugs, Ducky was a great addition to our lineup of 2026 robots, helping us preserve time of making new robots rather than fixing up old ones.