Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck

(pollen-robotics.com)

99 points | by robotswantdata 2 hours ago

14 comments

  • _joel 20 minutes 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%.
  • utopiah 46 minutes 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
  • amelius 16 minutes ago
    Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators.
  • martianvoid 55 minutes 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 1 hour ago
    this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/
    • utopiah 49 minutes ago
      This "with emotions like a living creature" should just not be allowed.
      • kodoman 33 minutes ago
        why not?
        • dgellow 29 minutes 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

          • kodoman 9 minutes ago
            Honestly I feel that way for the whole AI friend industry that is developing, from AI boyfriends and girlfriends to just kind of AI 'friends'. But this sort of thing is a sort of robot pet and I think the dynamics are different. Some one replacing a robot cat with a cat is not an evil thing in the way that trying to substitute human relationships are.
            • dgellow 6 minutes ago
              I agree, just don’t lie about it. You can present it as a cute little robot pet without problems. No need to say “it expresses and feels emotions like a real cat”. The AI industry has normalized lying about your products to a whole new level, that shouldn’t be acceptable
          • tokai 20 minutes ago
            Years ago I worked with developmentally disabled people, that absolutely loved animals but could never be left alone with one much less own one. This kind of product would have brought so much joy to those people.
            • dgellow 12 minutes ago
              I don’t deny there is a market for it
    • tokai 23 minutes ago
      Its not even close to being the same product.
  • Mxbonn 53 minutes 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.
  • k3liutZu 1 hour ago
    My wife would love one of these.

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

  • Gannon6790 29 minutes ago
    I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles.
  • Depurator 44 minutes ago
    neat! since its written in rust, why not use https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2 for ipc?
  • SomeonesAccount 32 minutes ago
    That is sick
  • unprovable 1 hour ago
    Cute, and quite something if the sim-to-real pipeline is as smooth as we all might hope.
  • tietjens 1 hour ago
    What is the battery life?
    • world2vec 16 minutes 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.
    • amelius 40 minutes ago
      And can it walk back to a charge station and hook itself up?
      • tenuousemphasis 2 minutes ago
        You can train it to do pretty much anything.
      • dv_dt 32 minutes ago
        Add a hack to repurpose a phone wireless charger pad?
        • amelius 16 minutes ago
          My main question is if it would be able to find its way back.
  • jCalamari 1 hour ago
    AI is coming for pet market too.
    • amelius 39 minutes ago
      AI is taking all the fun jobs. Now also for pets.
  • snalty 22 minutes ago
    Ugh, PAL only? I'll wait for the NTSC version.