Microduck: AI-trained robot duck twins debut in flight simulator
A 25 cm open-source robot duck walks in a way you train yourself? That’s Microduck, and yes, it’s exactly as weird as it sounds. What makes this a little more than just another cute robot isn’t the fact that it waddles around after you’ve pounded some reinforcement learning into it—it’s that you can upload its gait to a community of people who might want to make it do something even sillier. The launch simulator is already live, the policy-sharing button is there, and if you’re feeling generous (or just have an afternoon to waste), you can pre-order one while you’re at it. The real question isn’t whether it’s impressive. It’s whether you can stand to look at a duck robot in your home for more than five minutes. Technical Overview The robotics stack in this project isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, but it’s doing something most consumer robotics stacks don’t: shipping a sim-to-real pipeline that’s actually usable without a PhD. The key difference isn’t in the simulation so...