The robot collects ping pong balls for you

If you’ve ever played ping pong, table tennis, or beer pong, you know it’s hard to stay on top of the balls. [MaximeMonsieur] has designed a robot to handle picking them up so you don’t have to.

The robot is specially designed to pick up very light ping-pong balls. To do this, it has a large rotating paddle that simply flicks the balls into the collection basket at the back of it. The robot moves with a simple two-motor drive system that relies on a skid steer with a rear wheel. An Arduino Uno runs the show, navigating the robot around using ultrasonic sensors to avoid hitting walls.

Overall, the robot demonstrates the benefits of design for a specific purpose. Such a design would probably be much less successful with other heavier balls, but for ping-pong balls a rotating paddle collector works well. We can imagine the robot being used between sets to pick up all the lost balls around the table tennis court.

We’ve also seen other ball collecting robots before.