Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck

236 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by robotswantdata
(pollen-robotics.com)

86 Comments

lambda

32 minutes ago

Tried out the simulator and was surprised to find that the movement keys are ZQSD; then realized that's the equivalent of WASD on an AZERTY keyboard. Checked and sure enough, Pollen Robotics is a French company.

They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.

magimas

10 minutes ago

At least my QUERTZ layout also works as expected in the simulator. You use WASD to move the duck, Q and E to kick left and right etc.

I think it's just the splash screen they didn't properly localize.

echelon

24 minutes ago

> Pollen Robotics is a French company

Acquired by HuggingFace, a French-American company.

Acquired by Nvidia, an American company.

_joel

3 hours 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%.

Philip-J-Fry

2 hours ago

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.

asadm

43 minutes ago

The creators of Beni seem to have promised that the platform will be open (including sim2real parts of Beni).

I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.

_joel

an hour ago

yes to both :)

neom

2 hours ago

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)

serf

2 hours ago

I believe the Microduck camera footage (the ad - reel) about 1000x more than the Mondo one.

quadrature

2 hours ago

For what it’s worth the mondo team has been posting development log videos on Reddit since before they incorporated. They raised money so they now have ads with more production value, but they came from small beginnings and I do trust their product.

vavos

2 hours ago

The mondo beni bot was featured on mkbhd recently looked to work pretty well and got a positive review, for what's that's worth [0]

[0] - https://youtu.be/mfmdXPT7nAM

lumost

an hour ago

As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.

_joel

an hour ago

totally, it's on MKBKD video posted in other comments. I watched it last week and hence why I'm split

reaperducer

17 minutes ago

As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.

I've only contributed to three kickstarters, and they all worked out well. But I think I'm more selective than most people, and generally don't jump on something until it's already been fully funded by other people.

unglaublich

2 hours ago

Will Beni/monodorobotics have open source software, or at least a hackable stack?

amelius

an hour ago

Hey we're on HN where __anything__ is hackable :)

(Except iDevices of course)

trebligdivad

an hour ago

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!

amelius

14 minutes ago

Did anyone get programming in the simulator to work?

And why don't they show the video feed as seen by the camera?

Zylokloto

2 hours ago

Basic great usecase (not just fun things): IF you can control it remote, you can check your flat if you are gone for a little bit longer.

ricardobayes

an hour ago

Yeah, totally, it could even scale the stairs if needed. How about battery life though, can it go to sleep then be woken up on demand?

nunodonato

15 minutes ago

climbing stairs was my first question. But looking at its size, I dont think it will be able to

giarc

an hour ago

Or can it dock itself on a charger?

It appears to have a battery pack so a docking station is unlikely but hopefully can design and open source something.

regularfry

13 minutes ago

The easiest route is probably to have it sit with its back to a Qi charger pad, with the coils in a sort of cape over the battery. Not much added weight for the coils, and quite a neat little intro project to get it to align itself and sit correctly.

amelius

3 hours ago

Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators.

alnwlsn

4 minutes ago

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.

ricardobayes

an hour ago

I have already added googly eyes to mine to give it a bit of a flair. It's hilarious to watch it roam around.

k3liutZu

4 hours ago

My wife would love one of these.

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

raudette

an hour ago

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)

coreyh14444

35 minutes ago

Yep. I was at a dotcom (ZEFER) back then and we owned an OG AIBO robot for the office. This was 1999 I'm pretty sure.

anentropic

an hour ago

How much does it cost to train a new behaviour?

musha68k

an hour ago

Perfect for kids; especially great that it doesn't come with a display by default.

utopiah

3 hours 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

martianvoid

3 hours 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

3 hours ago

this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/

utopiah

3 hours ago

This "with emotions like a living creature" should just not be allowed.

kodoman

3 hours ago

why not?

dgellow

3 hours 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

Isamu

2 hours ago

How about “this duck fakes positive emotions like we all do from time to time”

tokai

3 hours 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.

forgetfreeman

an hour ago

I think it's distasteful to screen ethically questionable business practices with segments of the disabled community. If this product was being marketed towards the need of developmentally disabled individuals I feel like there would be less grounds for criticism, however meeting those needs in no way excuses outright fabrication of marketing claims aimed at the broader consumer market, and especially children.

tokai

26 minutes ago

You find something you made up distasteful? Get a grip. Its just a Furby.

dgellow

3 hours ago

I don’t deny there is a market for it

kodoman

3 hours 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

2 hours 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

kodoman

2 hours ago

Looking through the advertising.

> Through communication, Moflin’s emotional state changes. Your robot companion can show joy, sadness, and happiness, reacting just like a living creature would. Moflin does not possess actual emotions like humans do. Their emotional expressions are simulated by AI. And lots of bits of the advert seems to be explain how it's not real in the QA and that everything is a simulation.

I have not used the product, but nothing strikes me as dishonest about the advertising.

andrewfromx

an hour ago

i bought one about a year ago and used it for 20 days or so. Then I realised casio offered a full money back return for 30 days. And sorry little moflin your emotions were not real enough for me to want to keep you vs get $400 back.

kodoman

44 minutes ago

They do look cute, but $400 is steep.

ForHackernews

2 hours ago

> Your robot companion can show joy, sadness, and happiness, reacting just like a living creature would.

Seems like a lie to me. Compare:

> Our synthetic foodstuffs can taste sweet, salty, tart or tangy, delicious flavors just like natural ingredients.

(But then it's all aspartame, etc.)

kodoman

2 hours ago

I guess we are really debating the semantics of the sentences now like lawyers but to me the verb show is not particularly difficult to achieve or ambitious or misleading to use in this sort of product. A toy with a that has a smiley face and a frowning face is capable of showing two different emotions.

Your second one point also does not seem like a lie to me since it's claiming to emulate natural ingredient (although here I guess to be just like means to emulate perfectly).

I don't really see why any one would look at the product and it's marketing as evil. It seems to me aimed at people who can not have pets and are want to create a simulation of a soothing positive interaction with a pet. I don't see this as exploitative (apart from it's exploiting a desire that people have in the same way that virtually all products do), I can not see someone forming a relationship with this to the detriment of human interaction or exacerbate some kind of mental illness or cause addiction. It does seem a little expensive and that would be my only criticism of the product so far as I can see.

ricardobayes

an hour ago

It's a different target market I guess. I welcome innovation like this - it's possibly tackling the loneliness epidemic in however small ways.

tokai

3 hours ago

Its not even close to being the same product.

ahoka

2 hours ago

Finally an AI slop I can keep as a pet. I hate this dystopia.

ge96

an hour ago

that's so cute how it roller skates

cekanoni

an hour ago

It looks cool no doubt, but i would be concerned about privacy.

nater5000

33 minutes ago

Well all of the operations are local and on-board, so unless you explicitly send your data somewhere, privacy shouldn't be a concern.

Mxbonn

3 hours 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.

lrvick

26 minutes ago

Now that Nvidia huggingface, I fear their days being able to support open source products are over.

tietjens

4 hours ago

What is the battery life?

world2vec

3 hours 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.

NitpickLawyer

2 hours ago

Since it's programmable, I guess one could tinker with it to do just that?

amelius

3 hours ago

And can it walk back to a charge station and hook itself up?

dv_dt

3 hours ago

Add a hack to repurpose a phone wireless charger pad?

amelius

3 hours ago

My main question is if it would be able to find its way back.

_flux

2 hours ago

The biggest idea of this device seems to be that people would be able to write software to it, so this seems very likely to be in the domain of achievable things, because it has a camera and LIDAR.

tenuousemphasis

2 hours ago

You can train it to do pretty much anything.

amelius

2 hours ago

You can train deep learning to do anything. But the question is ... will it do it? And the next question: how reliably?

jCalamari

3 hours ago

AI is coming for pet market too.

amelius

3 hours ago

AI is taking all the fun jobs. Now also for pets.

teiferer

2 hours ago

Don't believe that all pet animals are having a great life.

Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way overfed, there is now constant warfare in the house cause cats (that are not directly blood related) actually hate each other, another word for being territorial. "Oh look how cute they are playing with each other, chasing through the house!" Yeah no, it's Hunger Games day in day out. Other species don't fare better, from turtles living in their own s*it to birds who never can fly. We are very cruel to our pets, often too ignorant to notice, with exceptions being much too rare.

I welcome those pets being replaced by robots.

Gannon6790

3 hours ago

I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles.

tamimio

an hour ago

I hope it’s not built on ROS or rely on it in any way!

Also kudos for bringing the joy of robotics back, since now most companies are riding the “defense” bandwagon and all robot companies I know suddenly are defense companies and visiting their sites is like the most dystopian thing ever, making it harder to find contract/jobs for people who want to make robotics for good not killing machines.

lagrange77

19 minutes ago

What would be so bad about relying on ROS in any way?

snalty

3 hours ago

Ugh, PAL only? I'll wait for the NTSC version.

grommz

an hour ago

Made in China with a 500% markup. No thanks, I will wait for the Chinese version for less than $100.