Google just made building your own AI-powered robot about as accessible as assembling IKEA furniture. At Google I/O 2026, the company demonstrated the Open Duck robot, a compact, 3D-printable machine running on its latest Gemma 4 open-weight AI model, performing agentic tasks entirely on-device without needing a cloud connection.
The robot is based on the Open_Duck_Mini project, an open-source initiative hosted on GitHub that lets anyone with a 3D printer and roughly $400 in parts build their own miniature version of Disney’s BDX Droid. Google paired this hardware platform with Gemma 4 to show what local AI inference looks like when it walks around on two legs.
What Gemma 4 actually does here
Gemma 4, launched on April 2, 2026, is Google’s latest family of open-weight AI models. The model weights are freely available for anyone to download, modify, and deploy, all under a full Apache 2.0 license. That’s a first for the Gemma series.
The model family supports multimodal inputs, meaning it can process text, images, and other data types simultaneously. Context windows range from 128K to 250K tokens depending on the model variant.
