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 currently have language processing onboard, it’s not impossible.
“It’s technically feasible and could be a future development. Even if we’re not the ones doing it, I expect the community to build it in a matter of weeks after the first users get their robots.”
The performance from these and similar training models continues to improve. With a low price and open SDK, we expect it won’t be long before you can tell one to clean your room, provided your messes are made up of socks and other lightweight debris that fits in the duck’s bill.
As the list of affordable walking robots gets longer, the list of excuses not to play with one gets shorter. Microduck is available for pre-order now, and first deliveries are “are targeted before Christmas 2026." You can learn more at pollen-robotics.com/microduck. Of course if you want to build your own up from scratch, that’s always an option too.
ADVERTISEMENT
