Quick Summary
Additional Context
It’s as true for robots as it is for animals, the smallest ones are the cutest ones. If you’ve been following the waddling bipedal bot scene, you were thrilled when Disney showed off their BDX droid. Since then it was spun off by the community into the DIY Open Duck Mini, sponsored by Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics. And now those partner companies have launched Microduck, an adorable $400 open source, trainable robot.
Microduck is made for people to learn and experiment with reinforcement learning. With failure an inevitability, the proportions are deliberate. From the pigeon-toed walk to the bowlegged skating to the fact that they each have their own individual “voice,” charm oozes out of these things. The SDK is open source, and the repository is on Github. While the bots don’t curren