Microduck(pollen-robotics.com)
750 points by robotswantdata 14 days ago | 244 comments
tl;dr: Microduck is a 25cm open-source bipedal robot from Pollen Robotics, featuring 15 motors, a camera with LiDAR, and two IMUs, priced at $399 with pre-orders shipping before Christmas 2026. It ships with 7 pre-trained RL policies (walk, sit/stand, kick, grab, skate, get-up) trained in MuJoCo sim, and the full SDK and training stack are Apache-2.0 licensed on GitHub for users to retrain and deploy their own behaviors.
HN Discussion:
  • Excitement about hobbyist potential and hackability similar to Arduino's impact
  • Appreciation for accessible setup compared to Nvidia Isaac's difficulty
  • Providing additional technical specs and context missing from the article
  • ~Minor UX criticism about AZERTY-defaulted keyboard controls in simulator
  • Concern that the open-source robot will be used as free training data for commercial robots