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  • My wife would love one of these.

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

    by k3liutZu
  • 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)

    by raudette
  • 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
    by utopiah
  • Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators.
    by amelius
  • I think so too
    by taevirus
  • Nobody is stopping you from bolting on a modified Casio watch.
    by dermacentor
  • I have already added googly eyes to mine to give it a bit of a flair. It's hilarious to watch it roam around.
    by ricardobayes
  • Old Roombas used to come with a serial port so you could use drive the motors and use it as a robot base. Then, you stick a wireless router and a webcam on top - no raspberry pi in those days.
    by alnwlsn
  • Getting close: https://us.roborock.com/products/roborock-saros-z70
    by xnx
  • 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

    by martianvoid
  • 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/

    by telecuda
  • I use one to control my house with Home Assistant. It's pretty great, and it was a lot of fun to assemble.
    by jamesponddotco
  • 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!
    by trebligdivad
  • Follow the money!
    by antonvs
  • What is really interesting for me is that they're not using Nvidia's Issac, which is famously impossible to get up and running for a custom robot by individual contributors. I can't tell how good their system is, but the fact that I got it running on my laptop in under an hour, vs wasting over a week of my spare time on Issac (ref: countless reddit threads by hundreds of people also failing to train their robot on Issac) gives me confidence I can finally convert my terrible IK stuff on my robot, to use this other framework.

    This appears to be using mjlab, which is is MuJoCo Warp plus rsl_rl, which uses a completely different design/technology heritage from Issac, so that's worth a lot to me, since I've basically sworn off Issac for robot gait training.

    by hadlock
  • Nvidia seems to be pushing Newton as a replacement for Isaac, so I think they're on the same page as you and me
    by ethanlipson
  • 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%.
    by _joel
  • Boni seems more like a closed project and I'd rather have something where access isn't an afterthought as indicated on the Kickstarter.

    > Right now, we simply haven't reached any conclusions regarding developer tools, documentation, or access. We haven't done the planning or the groundwork yet. Our current plan is to look into all of this after we've shipped the first batch and things settle down a bit.

    by rtkwe
  • As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.
    by lumost
  • I believe the Microduck camera footage (the ad - reel) about 1000x more than the Mondo one.
    by serf
  • Personally I wouldn't choose one that hasn't shipped. Hardware projects are notorious for delivering late, with fewer features, or not at all.

    Microduck looks amazing, but the "Ships before Christmas 2026" is begging to be blown past. That's why I'm not pre-ordering. If it's around in the spring, let's go, but considering that HuggingFace just got acquired by Nvidia, I'm not sure where this all will go.

    by tyre
  • 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.
    by monkeydust
  • 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)
    by neom
  • Both are expensive e waste, companies come up every 5 years with these "house robots for kids", they're used for about 5 days, I've seen the cycle many times already
    by toasty228
  • 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.

    by Philip-J-Fry
  • I found a few open-source small bipedal robots on the internet. There are actually many open-source robots available:

    [1]. https://robotics.umich.edu/news/2024/a-smaller-simpler-biped...

    https://github.com/daviddoo02/Legolas-an-open-source-biped

    [2].https://github.com/MuShibo/Micro-Wheeled_leg-Robot

    [3].https://github.com/Yuexuan9/Tinker

    Quadruped:

    [1].https://github.com/stanfordroboticsclub/StanfordQuadruped

    [2].https://open-dynamic-robot-initiative.github.io/

    by num42
  • I would love the simplest one of these with just wheels and an arm. Could do so much with it.
    by pj_mukh
  • Thanks for the links! There is also Upkie: https://github.com/upkie/upkie
    by clarus
  • So which one should people buy?
    by _giorgio_
  • Page is so dense, couldn't find the specs:

    Rockchip RK3566 processor with an AI accelerator, 1GB RAM, 32GB storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphones, speaker, two NFC antennas and removable battery (~1 hour runtime). Onboard policy loop: 50 hertz, Dynamixel servos, weight: 800g.

    Seven behaviors at ship: walking, sitting and standing, kicking, ground pickup, roller skating and self-recovery, can train additional behaviors locally or through Hugging Face Jobs, export to ONNX and deploy through open-source runtime. Software: SDK, a MuJoCo-based simulator, training scripts, tools for transferring policies from simulation to the physical robot.

    by mrandish