logoalt Hacker News

Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck

154 pointsby robotswantdatatoday at 10:57 AM54 commentsview on HN

Comments

_joeltoday at 12:47 PM

It's either this or https://mondorobotics.com/ and I'm torn. Obviously it's for my daughter and I will just be safety checking, definitely, 100%.

show 6 replies
Zyloklototoday at 1:56 PM

Basic great usecase (not just fun things): IF you can control it remote, you can check your flat if you are gone for a little bit longer.

show 1 reply
telecudatoday at 1:31 PM

It doesn't walk like a duck, but Reachy Mini by HF/Pollen Robotics is a great entry-level robot. And you get to assemble it!

Direct links: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/ https://pollen-robotics.com/reachy-mini/

utopiahtoday at 12:20 PM

for microduck I didn't find but their older reachy_miny was Apache 2.0 and hardware design files as Creative Commons BY-SA-NC

martianvoidtoday at 12:11 PM

This actually seems awesome, just going through the video on their site made me burst out with 100 different ways in which I would tinker with it, spend time in learning different gaits, some RL or some tricks to have it jump or do a back flip

I can see some parallel between how arduino gave hobbyist a mini computer they can use in any way imaginable, I can see this kind of thing being used to solve unimaginable problems by hobbyist or RL computer scientist or heck any UG student with claude subscription

ameliustoday at 12:50 PM

Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators.

show 2 replies
cs1996today at 12:02 PM

this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/

show 4 replies
k3liutZutoday at 11:57 AM

My wife would love one of these.

She's still bitter we didn't get the Sony dog a decade ago.

Mxbonntoday at 12:14 PM

This looks really cool! The cuteness of the demo alone makes me want one. Ideally I would also love for it to have a real use case in my home but right now I really cant think of one.

tamimiotoday at 2:05 PM

I hope it’s not built on ROS or rely on it in any way!

Also kudos for bringing the joy of robotics back, since now most companies are riding the “defense” bandwagon and all robot companies I know suddenly are defense companies and visiting their sites is like the most dystopian thing ever, making it harder to find contract/jobs for people who want to make robotics for good not killing machines.

show 1 reply
Depuratortoday at 12:22 PM

neat! since its written in rust, why not use https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2 for ipc?

show 1 reply
Gannon6790today at 12:38 PM

I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles.

unprovabletoday at 11:47 AM

Cute, and quite something if the sim-to-real pipeline is as smooth as we all might hope.

tietjenstoday at 11:56 AM

What is the battery life?

show 2 replies
SomeonesAccounttoday at 12:34 PM

That is sick

jCalamaritoday at 12:01 PM

AI is coming for pet market too.

show 1 reply
snaltytoday at 12:44 PM

Ugh, PAL only? I'll wait for the NTSC version.