Microduck
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Pollen Robotics opens pre-orders for a $399 open-source biped robot trained via reinforcement learning.
Microduck is a 25 cm, 800 g open-source biped robot. It ships with seven pre-trained behaviors (walk, sit, kick, grab, roller skate, get back up) and uses MuJoCo physics simulation for sim-to-real transfer. Users can retrain policies on their own machine and publish them to the community. The full SDK and RL training stack are on GitHub under Apache-2.0. Pre-orders are $399, with shipping before Christmas 2026.
What commenters are saying
Commenters were enthusiastic about the robot's potential as a hackable platform, comparing it favorably to the Arduino ecosystem for RL and hobbyist use. Some raised practical concerns: battery life is 1 hour, it doesn't return to a charger, and reliability of trained behaviors is uncertain. A side thread discussed the ethics of AI pets versus real pets, with some arguing robots could humanely replace poorly cared-for animals. Several commenters compared Microduck to the Sony Aibo and the Mondo Beni robot.