Thousands of people are about to start training behaviors on real, tiny humanoid robots
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Pollen Robotics, a company that develops tiny humanoid robots, has released a new robot that is generating significant interest, with pre-orders exceeding expectations at a rate of one robot every five seconds. An engineer from Pollen Robotics expressed excitement about the potential for users to train behaviors on these robots, learn from the experience, and contribute to the community. The company is keen to hear the community's thoughts on this new development.
Pollen Robotics engineer here. I’d like to discuss a deeper subject than the rumors about Nvidia acquiring us. Today we released a new robot, pre-orders are going crazy (1 robot every 5 seconds, beyond any expectation we had!).
Some will see Microduck as a toy (and that’s fine, go have fun!) but I think it’s important to see that this thing is a full-on biped humanoid robot with an open-source software stack and a sim2real pipeline that works surprisingly well.
This means that, in a few months, we’ll have thousands of enthusiasts trying their hand at reinforcement learning on a real robot and generating new behaviors. This is a complete shift from the LLM landscape where you have a few huge entities that train huge models.
I wish this existed when I started doing robotics in 2010. I expect the rate of improvement to accelerate. Especially with coding agents being so good that almost anyone can work on this.
I hope people will have fun with it, learn a lot, and contribute back a lot. Curious to hear what this community thinks about it!