Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck

186

rrobotswantdata about 4 hours ago 65 commentsRead Article on pollen-robotics.com

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86% Positive

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Discussion (65 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

_joel•about 2 hours ago

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%.

Philip-J-Fry•about 1 hour ago

That's a completely different class of robot. The Beni robot is just a toy, it's just connect the app and drive it around, record videos and do some fancy tricks like flips. It is not meant to be a platform you program yourself.

The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.

It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? Then probably the Microduck is the way. If it's literally just a toy, then the Beni robot is better because that's literally all it is.

_joel•37 minutes ago

yes to both :)

monkeydust•35 minutes ago

I got this for my kids https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doly/doly-more-than-a-r... earlier this year (after a much longer than expected wait on Kickstarter)...was good for a bit and had some fun but mostly gathering dust now. Occasionally will come out if friends are over.

neom•about 1 hour ago

MKBHD covered Beni the other day and it looks like a super super fun toy. Not sure about the educational value, but I was thinking about getting one for the kid in my life (me). https://youtu.be/mfmdXPT7nAM?t=592 (9:52)

lumost•41 minutes ago

As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.

_joel•38 minutes ago

totally, it's on MKBKD video posted in other comments. I watched it last week and hence why I'm split

serf•about 1 hour ago

I believe the Microduck camera footage (the ad - reel) about 1000x more than the Mondo one.

quadrature•about 1 hour ago

For what it’s worth the mondo team has been posting development log videos on Reddit since before they incorporated. They raised money so they now have ads with more production value, but they came from small beginnings and I do trust their product.

sowrabh•about 1 hour ago

FWIW Beni also figured in MKBHD's review recently and he had good things to say about it too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfmdXPT7nAM&t=590s

vavos•about 1 hour ago

The mondo beni bot was featured on mkbhd recently looked to work pretty well and got a positive review, for what's that's worth [0]

[0] - https://youtu.be/mfmdXPT7nAM

unglaublich•about 1 hour ago

Will Beni/monodorobotics have open source software, or at least a hackable stack?

amelius•36 minutes ago

Hey we're on HN where __anything__ is hackable :)

(Except iDevices of course)

trebligdivad•9 minutes ago

Oh so this is why Nvidia (edit: trying to buy)/bought Hugging Face, $1B for all the ai sharing and stuff, and $12B for the duck!

anentropic•11 minutes ago

How much does it cost to train a new behaviour?

Zylokloto•about 1 hour ago

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.

ricardobayes•33 minutes ago

Yeah, totally, it could even scale the stairs if needed. How about battery life though, can it go to sleep then be woken up on demand?

telecuda•about 1 hour ago

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/

utopiah•about 2 hours ago

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

k3liutZu•about 3 hours ago

My wife would love one of these.

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

raudette•14 minutes ago

I remember it being the 90s :) the first generation AIBO was discontinued TWO decades ago.

(it does look like subsequent models were launched about a decade ago)

cekanoni•16 minutes ago

It looks cool no doubt, but i would be concerned about privacy.

martianvoid•about 3 hours ago

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

cs1996•about 3 hours ago

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

ricardobayes•29 minutes ago

It's a different target market I guess. I welcome innovation like this - it's possibly tackling the loneliness epidemic in however small ways.

utopiah•about 2 hours ago

This "with emotions like a living creature" should just not be allowed.

kodoman•about 2 hours ago

why not?

dgellow•about 2 hours ago

Because it’s a lie. And is pushing for even worse sycophantic products

> Emotional AI Support, Powered by Intelligence

Targeting emotionally vulnerable people with AI promises is pretty disgusting

ahoka•about 1 hour ago

Finally an AI slop I can keep as a pet. I hate this dystopia.

tokai•about 2 hours ago

Its not even close to being the same product.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

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

xnx•about 2 hours ago

Getting close: https://us.roborock.com/products/roborock-saros-z70

ricardobayes•32 minutes ago

I have already added googly eyes to mine to give it a bit of a flair. It's hilarious to watch it roam around.

Mxbonn•about 2 hours ago

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.

Depurator•about 2 hours ago

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

Philip-J-Fry•about 1 hour ago

Because now you're locked into the Rust ecosystem.

JSONRPC over Unix sockets is a better interface for language agnostic IPC.

unprovable•about 3 hours ago

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

Gannon6790•about 2 hours ago

I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles.

tietjens•about 3 hours ago

What is the battery life?

world2vec•about 2 hours ago

1 hour according to the spec sheet. Would be nice if it knew battery was running out and "sat" on a wireless charger by itself.

NitpickLawyer•about 1 hour ago

Since it's programmable, I guess one could tinker with it to do just that?

amelius•about 2 hours ago

And can it walk back to a charge station and hook itself up?

dv_dt•about 2 hours ago

Add a hack to repurpose a phone wireless charger pad?

amelius•about 2 hours ago

My main question is if it would be able to find its way back.

tenuousemphasis•about 2 hours ago

You can train it to do pretty much anything.

amelius•about 1 hour ago

You can train deep learning to do anything. But the question is ... will it do it? And the next question: how reliably?

jCalamari•about 3 hours ago

AI is coming for pet market too.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

AI is taking all the fun jobs. Now also for pets.

teiferer•about 1 hour ago

Don't believe that all pet animals are having a great life.

Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way overfed, there is now constant warfare in the house cause cats (that are not directly blood related) actually hate each other, another word for being territorial. "Oh look how cute they are playing with each other, chasing through the house!" Yeah no, it's Hunger Games day in day out. Other species don't fare better, from turtles living in their own s*it to birds who never can fly. We are very cruel to our pets, often too ignorant to notice, with exceptions being much too rare.

I welcome those pets being replaced by robots.

SomeonesAccount•about 2 hours ago

That is sick

tamimio•37 minutes ago

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.

darkseed•23 minutes ago

Its not https://github.com/pollen-robotics/microduck

snalty•about 2 hours ago

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

grommz•18 minutes ago

Made in China with a 500% markup. No thanks, I will wait for the Chinese version for less than $100.