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Microduck from Pollen Robotics runs on open source software, is just 25cm tall, and is ready to play out of the box
If it walks like a robot duck and quacks like a robot duck, it’s probably a Microduck robot from Hugging Face subsidiary Pollen Robotics. And it's ready to work with AI.Bordeaux, France-based Pollen announced the Microduck on Thursday, describing it as a robot designed for immediate action, as well as being ready for training via reinforcement learning in an open-source physics simulator to teach it new tasks. Microduck is tiny, mind you: It’s a mere 25 cm tall (a little under 10 inches), and weighs in at about 800 grams (1.76 pounds), so don’t expect this to serve as your own in-home AI butler or cleaner. It’s more of a cheap (just $399) testbed designed to teach users about hardware AI, machine learning, and the potential of modern robotics.
Microduck “sets out to make building AI on real hardware as approachable as running a model: complex behaviours out of the box, then an open-source stack covering robot control, simulation, RL training and sim-to-real deployment, so new skills can be trained in simulation and transferred to the robot,” Pollen writes on Microduck’s website.
