Introducing the Microduck
Table of Contents
Meet the Microduck
Previously, I wrote about Reachy, a desktop robot from Pollen Robotics in association with HuggingFace. That partnership has come up with a new kind of open-source robot — the Microduck. “At 25 cm tall, 14 cm wide and under 800 g, Microduck is built for the messy reality of reinforcement learning,” says the press release.
Reinforcement learning is a way that robots can learn to do something instead of being taught or programmed to do it. The key is that they can try a million ways until finding something that works. It’s like a child learning to walk and falling all the time until they figure it out. They call this kind of learned behavior a policy. They explain that doing reinforcement learning on the robot itself is slow. Their solution is to “train the robot in simulation and transfer the learned policy to the real world, known as sim-to-real transfer.”
A typical development loop looks like this: train in simulation (on your computer), deploy on the real-world robot, observe the behavior, refine the simulation parameters, repeat the process, share the policy with the community.
The results looks like a lot of fun but it should be fun for developers to train. There’s something a lot more playful with a robot that looks like an animal rather than a human. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from cartoon characters, the world of animation is a lot more fun and playful rather than “realistic” characters.
Microduck was designed to feel like more than just a robotics platform: dynamic, lively and expressive, with behaviors that make it engaging even before users start customizing. Its compact proportions and deliberately playful gait give it a distinctive waddle that reinforces its duck-like character.
Microduck's camera, LiDAR and motion sensing let users create behaviors that react to people, objects and the surrounding environment, making interactions feel less scripted and more pet-like. A dedicated camera indicator, inspired by classic REC lights, turns on whenever the camera is active. At launch, Microduck will include perception-driven modes such as detecting and chasing a laser dot across the floor, much like a cat.
The Microduck robot will sell for $399 and will be available by Christmas from Pollen Robotics.
Maker Faire Tulsa
Last week, Nathan Pritchett talked to me about Fab Lab Tulsa, which got started fifteen years ago. This week, he talks about the 14th year of Maker Faire Tulsa, which takes place today.
Nathan: It's hard to believe it’s the 14th year.
Dale: Why is that?
Nathan: I remember we went to the Maker Faire in Kansas City. That was our first experience. When we were driving back to Tulsa and we started talking about having a Maker Faire in Tulsa. We had no idea what we were doing.
This year is going to be a good one. We've got a little over 60 makers and a really good variety. We have combat robotics, which is always the most exciting thing we have. A combat robotics group here in Northeastern Oklahoma that has 8- to 12-inch robots. They'll have their arena set up with a couple of fire extinguishers in case we have a fire or two, which are always nice to have.
Dale: Where does it take place?
Nathan: We do it at Expo Square where we have a a big building at the fairgrounds in Tulsa.
Dale: Okay.
Nathan: It's one of the things that makes Maker Faire so great as part of our Fab Lab because we can only have around 150 people in our building. By being the producer of Maker Faire Tulsa for this one day out of the year, we can have 3,000 people come out and and see us. And it's really bigger than us. It's our chance to invite all the rest of the people from the community out to the event.
Dale: Do you have other other makerspaces participating?
Nathan: I'm just looking at the other makerspaces. The library makerspace will be here. The makerspace from Wichita, Kansas, MakeICT, will be here. We'll have makers from over in Fayetteville, Arkansas come over for the day.
The most interesting group that we have is a little shop in town called Black Moth, which is a nature store. She sells skulls and insects and all kinds of things. On one end, we have the naturalist thing with dinosaur teeth, and on the other end, we have combat robotics and then everything in between. It’s a great environment.
What Fab Lab Tulsa does is organize the activity zones in the middle of the fair.
Dale: What kind of activities do you have?
Nathan: We do three of them. They're based around the three things that we kind of care about — engineering, robotics, and a cyber program. We're doing an activity of turning a a block into a robot. Mine's not very good. Don't laugh. They can come up and get a a 2x4 and we have lots of nails and rivets and different things and they can basically add arms and legs and things to it. I tried to make mine into a race car driver. Not not a good example.
They can basically use hand tools. We have a drill press, some saws, and they can shape it and hammer on it and get those basic skills.
We also do a little Sphero robotics course where they can do some robotics and and we work closely through the university on some cyber security “catch the fish” games and things like that that teach um basics of of cyber security, and how to be safe online.
Dale: Everybody comes on Saturday.
Nathan: We just do Saturday. That's all our feet can stand.
Maker Faire Yukon
Also, this weekend is Maker Faire Yukon at latitude 60°00′ N in Canada. It is organized by Yukonstruct, an innovation hub and makerspace. Producer Rick Yorgason told us they have a lot planned for both days.
Combat robots: We hosted a build-your-own robot event earlier this month, and the new pilots have been customizing their robots at home, so I'm really excited to see what they changed!
Our other big keystone event is the Cyberpunk Ball, an LED and blacklight fueled costume party where makers can let loose, including glow in the dark drinks and circus performers.
We've got a tonne of activities and demos: black smithing, fractal wood burning, soldering, wood burning, jewelry making, wood turning, all free for participants.
Some of our events and booths definitely have a northern edge, like making your own birdcage awl out of chainsaw files and antler, or making something at our local glass blowing studio. (I like that a guy named Bob Sharp is teaching “Tool Making.”)
One of the unique activities we like to run is something called Rocket Eggs. It's like an egg drop, but the egg is on a CO2-powered sled, so the challenge is to see how fast you can make your egg go without breaking it.
Find out more about Maker Faire Yukon on Makezine.com.
AI as a Medium is the message
Tim O’Reilly wrote a really interesting essay on Writing with AI. While some writers are defiantly turning away from AI, and others are embarrassed to admit they use it, O’Reilly is using it in interesting ways, and he sees “AI as a medium.”
I say AI is a medium, like painting, sculpture, photography, music, or language itself. If AI is a medium, it is a field of possibility from which humans can and will summon up and communicate insights, truth, beauty.
I heard someone recently point out that film is about a hundred years old as a medium and look what’s been done in that time in terms of craft, artistic vision and yes, commercialization. O’Reilly thinks “it will take time for its possibilities to unfold, discovery on discovery.”
He adds:
If AI is a medium, the idea that you can’t write with it will someday seem as odd as the idea that you can’t make a good portrait or landscape with a camera, only with paint or pen and ink. Technical innovations have often changed the nature of art.
One might expect this medium to be a collaborative art, the way film is, but also empower the individual creator. Who will be the creators and makers experimenting and failing but also finding out something that others have not — the techniques, the forms, the new uses for interactivity, and new forms of expression — and what they could create that others were unable to create previously?
The “medium is the message” is a phrase from Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” Technology alters the scale and shape of human communication and its associated social patterns.
Anouk Wipprecht - F1 trophy maker
Dutch designer/maker Anouk Wipprecht, a fashion favorite of Maker Faire Bay Area, designed and made the trophy for the Dutch Grand Prix last week, as she writes on LinkedIn.
Last Sunday, the trophy I designed for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix with Royal Delft at Zandvoort was lifted on the podium by Lando Norris - and seeing something that started as ideas, sketches, polygons, electronics and a lot of problem-solving become part of that moment was pretty surreal.
I soldered, engineered and coded these trophies with my own hands 🔩⚙️🔧 And alongside Julia Huijer, Joffrey Walonker, Mischa, and Royal Delft's masterpainter Laurens, we worked on this for almost 6 months.
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