This duck will teach you reinforcement learning — and pick up your socks
You could have a mechanical duck waddling through your home before Christmas. Hugging Face‘s Pollen Robotics on Thursday opened pre-orders The post This duck will teach you reinforcement learning — and pick up your socks appeared first on The New Stack .
An introductory price of $399 will soon make a mechanical duck, named Microduck, a reality for homes across North America and Europe. Designed by Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics, the 25 cm tall bipedal robot is capable of walking, waddling, using roller-skates, and even picking up objects with its beak. When the duck falls, it can automatically get back up. This follows the company's previous desktop robot, Reachy Mini, which was stationary and focused on human interaction.
The Microduck's primary aim is to teach robots how to move, allowing developers to train physical behaviors in simulation, transfer them to real hardware, and observe any issues. With an open-source SDK, virtual training environment, and reinforcement learning scripts, the robot offers a platform to experiment with AI and see it transition from simulation to the real world. The code is available under the Apache 2.0 license, while the hardware design files are licensed non-commercially to prevent cloning.
In addition to being a playful toy, Microduck is also an open-source platform with a physics simulator, allowing users to teach the robot new movements. The team demonstrates training the duck's walking policy across 4,096 virtual ducks in parallel, resulting in a usable gait within one to two hours. The robot requires an Nvidia GPU for training, or it can be trained on Hugging Face's infrastructure.
Upon purchase, developers will receive a game controller to control the robot on the fly, along with seven pre-trained moves, including walking, sitting, standing, kicking, grabbing objects, roller skating, and recovering from falls. The hardware includes a Rockchip RK3566 with AI accelerator, 1GB of onboard memory, 32GB of storage, a front camera, LiDAR sensor, and two inertial measurement units. Accessories such as a Charger Pack, Dev Pack, microphones, and a speaker are also available.
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