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.
As a French guy who grew up playing CS 1.6 on an AZERTY keyboard, I have a feeling that the people who made this website are either a generation above or below Millenials.
Because it doesn't make sense: you don't make a website in English, with prices in USD... while expecting users to have an AZERTY keyboard.
I'm a millenial and can say you can absolutely make a site with i18n + currency conversion without knowing what keyboards people use. Especially Americans, who are much less familiar with "other markets", because companies can stay within US customers for so long.
When I started out playing Quake 1 many moons ago, when I complained about how to reach keybindings as I was using the arrow keys, a veteran player on the server told me patiently to use ESDF like a normal person. So I did, and learned, and it stuck with me. It wasn't until years later I realized that was more a rarity and people usually use WASD. I kept ESDF because I was used to it, and because it's nice have those two extra left keys as additional bindings.
All that's to say, if they'd used ESDF this wouldn't be an issue. You've been vindicated, kind hero.
Interestingly, the 10-lines-of-basic competition, which has been running the last 15 years (https://itch.io/profile/bunsen), has this covered in the rules:
15. If the game is controlled with the keyboard, use "O" for left, "P" for right, "E" for up and "D" for down if possible; this takes into account the most important keyboard layouts (no disadvantages for emulator users with QWERTZ, QWERTY or AZERTY keyboards)
Huh, when I tried it WASD didn't work like I expected, hence I went back and checked and saw that it was ZQSD. Looks like they might have fixed it now since I posted. Either that or the lagginess caught me up; it takes a second before it starts moving forward, it might be I got caught up by that, went back to look at the instructions and noticed the ZQSD, then went back and used the arrow keys since that was easier.
edit: just checked the code, and they cover both layouts by using the physical key code rather than the character. And that was committed before I tried it. So it must have been the fact that it was a bit slow to respond that got me.
Having tried (and failed) to use Issac to do the same thing, the fact that their simulator actually works out of the box, "batteries included", is a big deal for home hobbyists.
They do, which is why WASD (or whatever the positional equivalent in your layout is) work despite the text saying to press ZQSD. This only solves the input though, it doesn't let the page know ahead of time what letter it should tell you to press for those 4 positional inputs.
Chromium based browsers support navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap() to tackle this exact problem. Safari and Firefox do not due to concerns over fingerprinting. Still, it wouldn't hurt to add this second half for those users https://caniuse.com/?search=navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap%...
Not sure many people know this - most of the robotics stuff that you see in the news is based on MujoCo (Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact) engine, that is used primarily to create simulated environments in which these robots learn the RL policies. This project is maintained by Google deepmind - https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
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.
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.
I would describe the Microduck as more of a toy than Beni. Autonomous cameraman is a real application that Beni performs out of the box. I think you'll struggle to get Microduck to do anything genuinely useful.
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)
My favorite bit from that was when he had it do a flip and the battery ejected from it's niche and it died. Also the constant suicide attempts from trying to run it on a table but that's a problem for any mobile robot and tabletop demos.
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
The household robot business other than vacuums are a classic way to lose your shirt, sadly.
Many, many startups and several megacorps have burned their money. Robots are so fun to make, if you have that spirit in you! But alas they are very, very hard to make valuable outside of manufacturing /warehousing/weapons.
Makes sense. Unless you can disassemble/reassemble. I guess selling kits (Meccano, Technics) would be the better approach. I recall countless hours building stuff and my kids love their Magnetiles and everything that lets them build in a free-form.
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.
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.
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.
100%, and I go further to "don't buy hardware until it hits version 3" - version 1 is full of bugs, version 2 tries to include all the stuff they couldn't fit into the original version 1, so it's not until version 3 they've got a clear idea of what the thing should be and how to make it without bugs.
I have been wrong (I love my Remarkable 2), but it still holds as a principle ;)
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.
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.
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.
Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot.
It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
I can also turn on lights, the TV, the AC, ask about the weather, and other basic assistant stuff, ofc.
> It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
So basically you're using it as an AI mother in law, nice.
There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
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.
Two things that I always contemplate on whether to post this: 1) this can be a phone. 2) almost all of these except Sony ones got joint geometries completely "wrong" to be cutemaxxed toys.
I'm not a Sony employee or anything, but theirs is whole next level even just sitting unpowered, compared to even some of other Japanese bots. Everyone making these cutebots should have one of any of Sony bots to study, even just as a dead kinetic sculpture.
I think this version has a certain charm to it, reminiscent of Wall-E. I think avoiding the uncanny valley is better than trying to cutemax and failing.
All of Sony bots have somewhat abstract aesthetics. It's not about realism at all but about optimizing the looks. There are tons of basic stuffs like concave eyes that Aldebaran Nao had that a lot of art majors and 3D modellers should be able to come up with that lots of these cutebots are missing.
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Basically, reading writing (without instruction) will only make people seem like they know stuff, by parroting others, when in fact, they know not much of anything.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
I don’t know what you are on about. Can the robot exhibit signs of the emotions described? If it can then the sentence is not a lie. If it can’t then it is a lie. Are you saying that it won’t do what the sentence says?
The sentence is not saying “it is a living creature”. It says it behaves as one. How much of that sentence is a lie obviously depends on how well the robot works.
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
I've tried a few small robot kits and every single one fails the moment it reaches even moderately deep carpet. Either the size of motion doesn't clear the carpet or the motors aren't strong enough to deal with it. The living room is a small robots sand trap. Couldn't help but notice precious little carpet in any of the promo material. What's the point of a robot buddy if you cant play with it in the living room?
Is there an app for Microduck, or is it currently controlled/programmed directly through the SDK? I’d be interested to know if there’s a mobile app for basic control and setup.
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.
I think magnetically aligned physical pin connections are better. Charge faster, generate less heat, and better for the battery. Wireless charging is cool, but not sure why it would need to be wireless in this case.
Robots don’t die if you forget to feed them, and don’t get depressed if you don’t get around to taking them for walks. They also don’t need to be trained not to pee or poop in the house, not to bark at the mailman, etc.
Interesting that they're using Dynamixel instead of Feetech for the servos. More expensive but better quality. I'm surprised it still comes in under $400.
I would like it to pick up shoes, clothes etc. Not sure the beak would work, it would block the camera and prevent the bot from walking forward. Presumably, it could walk backwards and drag clothes, but anything rigid might block the camera.
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.
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.
I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.
What about the animals that have been domesticated to be pets? It's arguable that their native habitat is the home at this point. Although, I do hope we stop capturing the animals which aren't domesticated (most "exotic" pets).
I agree with the horror of pulling animals out of their natural habitat, but if you are using this as a blanket statement towards all living animals then you should read up on the history of the domestication of wolves (dogs). It was born of a beneficial relationship to both humans and wolves and i personally find my relationship with my dogs to be extremely fulfilling and i believe my dogs do as well.
I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I know the history. We bred them to be our pets and normalized this relationship. Your pet might even love his life. But we can do the same with robot AIs, and it will be a better relationship. Your robot can talk to you. It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.
I'd argue that emotional co-regulation is born out of biological origins. Unless we are making synth, it would be a long time to match the relationship with a living creature.
There are many many people for whom that will never be close to the same, let alone better. An immortal sack of wires that is passed down through generations is interesting and will appeal to many, but it’s not automatically a “better” relationship than a living creature.
> Your robot can talk to you.
If you want a conversation, may I suggest another person instead of a pet?
> It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.
If you want a way to automatically call 911, how about a smartwatch that tracks your vitals and does just that?
Anyway, stories of pets calling 911 are a dime a dozen.
> I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I think I could, if it meant I could keep the experience of having a pet.
I've had cats going back to my twenties. I dearly love my fifteen y/o cat. She's my last cat, though. As I approach fifty I've grown tired of hefting bags of litter and food, stooping to clean up after her, taking her to the vet, and administering her medication.
When she's finally dead (which is hopefully not for a good long time) I'm not going to get another. This makes me really sad. I'll miss having a cat around. As I age, though, I don't want the encumbrance of taking care of a pet, nor do I want to cause hardship to family if I suddenly become unable to care for a pet (dying, being hospitalized, living arrangement changes and owning a pet isn't allowed, etc).
If there was a robot alternative I'd jump on it. I think my brain would adjust fine to a convincingly-executed robotic cat. Our brains instinctively ascribe agency to objects moving in non-inertial frames, for example. Think about all the people who name their Roomba, install googly eyes on it, etc. People easily accept inanimate objects that behave like living things, to the point of developing feelings for them.
When my cat is gone I hope to get the opportunity to choose a "relationship" with a convincing robotic cat versus not having one at all.
I wouldn't expect everyone to feel this way. I certainly don't want to legislate away pet ownership.
I bet that, if good robotic pets become available, we'll see a significant number of people favoring them over living pets for convenience, long-term cost, freedom from anxiety about the pet's health and eventual death, and the opportunity for companionship in living arrangements where pets aren't allowed.
I've said, for years, that I think there's hundreds of billions of dollars for the company who can make really good robotic pets. If somebody can get the "soft robotics" down and build / train good animal behavior models I think they'll be able to print money.
Interesting how all of the replies so far to your comment assume we’d just release the existing animals into the wild instead of just not breeding more.
As one might guess, the "just" there is doing a lot of work.
Common pets reproduce just fine without our intervention - in practice it requires costly maintenance programs just to keep their population under control (not to mention the massive and ongoing eugenics program required to produce only the desirable breeds/attributes).
If your neighbourhood isn't overrun with stray cats and dogs, that's because someone is funding a spay/neuter program, and someone is funding animal control to round up (and ultimately euthanise) the rest.
All animal husbandry systems have to be maintained via regular culling, and "eliminating" pets would require orders of magnitude more killing
I always assumed the "enslaved animal-free" future would be something that came on gradually, likely motivated by economics (i.e. lab-grown meat becoming cheaper and higher quality than farmed, robotic pets being cheaper and more "trouble-free", etc).
I never felt like anybody seriously thought we'd release domestic animals into the wild to fend for themselves-- that's ludicrous.
> look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats
Somehow, vegan-inclined folks never seem to factor in the mass-genocide of domestic breeds that is necessary to achieve their particular utopia. We're talking 1.5 billion pets, 5 billion livestock, and 28 billion poultry - none of which are remotely able to survive on their own in the wild.
Wait... do you really think that if everyone goes vegan these animals will get killed, but if everyone eats them they won't?
You are aware that all of these livestock animals didn't exist a few months to years ago? And that we go through these animals every couple months-years?
Everyone going vegan would just mean we'd stop repleneshing them.
I detest the vegan movement. I'm not an animal lover. Pets are unsanitary nuisances. Robots are better. We don't need to commit a genocide against domestic pets for the transition. Just breed less.
I genuinely could not tell if this was a parody/satire or not, I think because the aesthetic reminds me of how a product like this would be presented in a horror movie or something
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.
Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.
> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all
That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.
On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.
> Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild
Natural selection has little to do with how pets are bred. The criteria their genes are being selected for by breeders have nothing to do with optimizing their happiness and more with what maximizes profit (which only losely relates to owner happiness).
Incidentally, lots of domesticated cats could survive in the wild just fine, just like lots of somewhat functional dog breeds. But that has nothing to do with whether the conditions keep them in are still painful to them.
Most humans can't survive in the wild. Put any of them in solitary confinement and you will see how much natural selection has done for them. We are social animals, just like dogs.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
No, because it is a human that has human rights. Which include the right to live. (Arguably they should have the right to decide the end of their life too, but religios groups are still having a strong grip on laws about that.) Animals don't. A friend of mine is a vet for farm animals and she always gets angry about how people treat their suffering pets. Cow has a painful broken leg? Bolt through brain, suffering ends immediately. Same with similarly injured sheep, goats, etc. No point in letting them suffer unnecessarily. Already horses are special because people get attached and sometimes they are worth tons of money so people rather pump them full with antibiotics. But dogs and cats? Man, people attach wheels to the lower end of dogs so they can keep their beloved buddy for another 2 years, even though that poor thing can't even go for a pee anymore. You can see owners drag their terminally ill dog through the streets which has clearly lost all will to live. We let pets suffer much more than cows or goats and it's cuel.
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.
One horrifying facts I've read about it is that ROS1 is completely non-realtime and non-deterministic, so much so that its ROSBAG data logs aren't time or sequence accurate. So you can collect the sensor inputs and simulate programmatic behavior, but it's acucrate only if you were lucky. And everyone has to either use it or devote massive amount of resource recreating it right way because there's just immense amount of useful packages available for ROS.
They have another non-duck model called Reachy Mini that has 4 microphones and an onboard raspberry pi + wifi + camera on board for dev. And, their reachy mini lite is pc controlled instead. Is that what you wanted?
"Have a conversation with Reachy! Powered by LLMs, it understands what you say and responds with expressive movements and speech."
I'm guessing you could have a bunch talking to each other. And, if you wanted them to non-verbally communicate with one another there's a morse-code app for it that can listen to taps / beeps. They have a TTS app, and they even have claude integration.
It's mega-cute, but I can't help feeling it's going to be used as free training for commercial robots.
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/
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.
As a French guy who grew up playing CS 1.6 on an AZERTY keyboard, I have a feeling that the people who made this website are either a generation above or below Millenials.
Because it doesn't make sense: you don't make a website in English, with prices in USD... while expecting users to have an AZERTY keyboard.
We even had a meme and tshirts about it: https://wiki.nofrag.com/Jte_niaue_q_lq_Kqlqsh
I'm a millenial and can say you can absolutely make a site with i18n + currency conversion without knowing what keyboards people use. Especially Americans, who are much less familiar with "other markets", because companies can stay within US customers for so long.
…"j'te nique à la kalash"?
Can't believe I'm typing these words, but here you go: "I fuck you with a Kalashnikov"
When I started out playing Quake 1 many moons ago, when I complained about how to reach keybindings as I was using the arrow keys, a veteran player on the server told me patiently to use ESDF like a normal person. So I did, and learned, and it stuck with me. It wasn't until years later I realized that was more a rarity and people usually use WASD. I kept ESDF because I was used to it, and because it's nice have those two extra left keys as additional bindings.
All that's to say, if they'd used ESDF this wouldn't be an issue. You've been vindicated, kind hero.
There was an interesting discussion around this a couple of years ago, I was quite surprised to see people still using ESDF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41148889
Interestingly, the 10-lines-of-basic competition, which has been running the last 15 years (https://itch.io/profile/bunsen), has this covered in the rules:
15. If the game is controlled with the keyboard, use "O" for left, "P" for right, "E" for up and "D" for down if possible; this takes into account the most important keyboard layouts (no disadvantages for emulator users with QWERTZ, QWERTY or AZERTY keyboards)
Typing bash commands on a colleague’s French keyboard was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life.
Exiting out of vim nightmare mode.
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.
Huh, when I tried it WASD didn't work like I expected, hence I went back and checked and saw that it was ZQSD. Looks like they might have fixed it now since I posted. Either that or the lagginess caught me up; it takes a second before it starts moving forward, it might be I got caught up by that, went back to look at the instructions and noticed the ZQSD, then went back and used the arrow keys since that was easier.
edit: just checked the code, and they cover both layouts by using the physical key code rather than the character. And that was committed before I tried it. So it must have been the fact that it was a bit slow to respond that got me.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/pollen-robotics/microduck-simu...
Having tried (and failed) to use Issac to do the same thing, the fact that their simulator actually works out of the box, "batteries included", is a big deal for home hobbyists.
I think they just need to use KeyboardEvent.code to design for key location, not key character.
They do, which is why WASD (or whatever the positional equivalent in your layout is) work despite the text saying to press ZQSD. This only solves the input though, it doesn't let the page know ahead of time what letter it should tell you to press for those 4 positional inputs.
Chromium based browsers support navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap() to tackle this exact problem. Safari and Firefox do not due to concerns over fingerprinting. Still, it wouldn't hurt to add this second half for those users https://caniuse.com/?search=navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap%...
Or just add the key commands as a hint to the simulation page. Was so keen to try it didnt really register the commands and assumed WASD.
> Pollen Robotics is a French company
Acquired by HuggingFace, a French-American company.
Acquired by Nvidia, an American company.
All roads lead to uh… America I guess?
Wherever the capital is (so yes, America)
The number in your username checks out.
Not sure many people know this - most of the robotics stuff that you see in the news is based on MujoCo (Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact) engine, that is used primarily to create simulated environments in which these robots learn the RL policies. This project is maintained by Google deepmind - https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
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.
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%.
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.
I would describe the Microduck as more of a toy than Beni. Autonomous cameraman is a real application that Beni performs out of the box. I think you'll struggle to get Microduck to do anything genuinely useful.
IMO with that definition of "toy" you're overselling the value of performing useful work and underselling the value of farting about.
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.
> Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.
it seems like the only useful capability this thing has is picking up very small items of clothing with I imagine a very low success rate.
yes to both :)
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)
My favorite bit from that was when he had it do a flip and the battery ejected from it's niche and it died. Also the constant suicide attempts from trying to run it on a table but that's a problem for any mobile robot and tabletop demos.
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
I love Battletech. If the IP holders ever get their shit together and have a properly walking Vulture/Mad-Dog, I'm sold.
Bonus points for laser tag capability like those tabletop tanks.
The household robot business other than vacuums are a classic way to lose your shirt, sadly.
Many, many startups and several megacorps have burned their money. Robots are so fun to make, if you have that spirit in you! But alas they are very, very hard to make valuable outside of manufacturing /warehousing/weapons.
Makes sense. Unless you can disassemble/reassemble. I guess selling kits (Meccano, Technics) would be the better approach. I recall countless hours building stuff and my kids love their Magnetiles and everything that lets them build in a free-form.
nerds cannot resist despite knowing this full well. "for kids"
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.
I believe the Microduck camera footage (the ad - reel) about 1000x more than the Mondo one.
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.
FWIW Beni also figured in MKBHD's review recently and he had good things to say about it too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfmdXPT7nAM&t=590s
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
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.
100%, and I go further to "don't buy hardware until it hits version 3" - version 1 is full of bugs, version 2 tries to include all the stuff they couldn't fit into the original version 1, so it's not until version 3 they've got a clear idea of what the thing should be and how to make it without bugs.
I have been wrong (I love my Remarkable 2), but it still holds as a principle ;)
As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.
totally, it's on MKBKD video posted in other comments. I watched it last week and hence why I'm split
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.
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.
Will Beni/monodorobotics have open source software, or at least a hackable stack?
Hey we're on HN where __anything__ is hackable :)
(Except iDevices of course)
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!
Follow the money!
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.
Nvidia seems to be pushing Newton as a replacement for Isaac, so I think they're on the same page as you and me
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/
I use one to control my house with Home Assistant. It's pretty great, and it was a lot of fun to assemble.
Sounds interesting, could you elaborate on what you do with?
Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot.
It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
I can also turn on lights, the TV, the AC, ask about the weather, and other basic assistant stuff, ofc.
> It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
So basically you're using it as an AI mother in law, nice.
Huh, that's pretty cool! How much of that behavior did you need to roll yourself vs what was already there?
There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators.
Getting close: https://us.roborock.com/products/roborock-saros-z70
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.
I think so too
I have already added googly eyes to mine to give it a bit of a flair. It's hilarious to watch it roam around.
Two things that I always contemplate on whether to post this: 1) this can be a phone. 2) almost all of these except Sony ones got joint geometries completely "wrong" to be cutemaxxed toys.
I'm not a Sony employee or anything, but theirs is whole next level even just sitting unpowered, compared to even some of other Japanese bots. Everyone making these cutebots should have one of any of Sony bots to study, even just as a dead kinetic sculpture.
I think this version has a certain charm to it, reminiscent of Wall-E. I think avoiding the uncanny valley is better than trying to cutemax and failing.
All of Sony bots have somewhat abstract aesthetics. It's not about realism at all but about optimizing the looks. There are tons of basic stuffs like concave eyes that Aldebaran Nao had that a lot of art majors and 3D modellers should be able to come up with that lots of these cutebots are missing.
Any specific Sony bots you're recommend looking at and studying?
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
My wife would love one of these.
She's still bitter we didn't get the Sony dog a decade 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)
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.
Surprised with the price, a similar form factor that I know of is even more expensive https://shop.xgorobot.com/products/xgo-rider-world-s-first-d...
(Chinese but since it's esp32 and raspberry pi it is possible to tinker with it)
I wonder what's the catch? Cheap IMU/motors?
No catch. Loss leader
this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/
It's a different target market I guess. I welcome innovation like this - it's possibly tackling the loneliness epidemic in however small ways.
its a cool toy, not a friend. The only way you "bond" with plastic is with some ScotchWeld.
This "with emotions like a living creature" should just not be allowed.
why not?
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
How about “this duck fakes positive emotions like we all do from time to time”
Plato thought writing was a lie:
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Basically, reading writing (without instruction) will only make people seem like they know stuff, by parroting others, when in fact, they know not much of anything.
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.
I don’t deny there is a market for it
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.
You find something you made up distasteful? Get a grip. Its just a Furby.
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.
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
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.
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.
They do look cute, but $400 is steep.
it wears off quick.
> 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.)
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.
I don’t know what you are on about. Can the robot exhibit signs of the emotions described? If it can then the sentence is not a lie. If it can’t then it is a lie. Are you saying that it won’t do what the sentence says?
The sentence is not saying “it is a living creature”. It says it behaves as one. How much of that sentence is a lie obviously depends on how well the robot works.
Its not even close to being the same product.
The reason some people fine Moflin terriying is due to differences between the Western and Eastern face reading.
In Western cultures, "mouth" is how one perceives emotions, while in the Eastern cultures, it's the eyes.
e.g.
You see Disney characters got all big mouths, while say, Japanese ones like in anime or Hello Kitty has small or no mouth but BIG eyes.
Same for Microduck. It's got gigantic mouth, while Moflin has none.
---
As a personal preference, I like anime/manga characters but not fond of disney characters nor other Pixar characters. they look terrible to me.
Black Mirror vibes
I find it terrifying
“I have no mouth but I must scream” is a Harlan Ellison story about an AI that tortures humans for revenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
I suppose Moflin is preemptive revenge against that scenario. “How do you like them apples, future torturing AI?”
Finally an AI slop I can keep as a pet. I hate this dystopia.
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
Does this work without an internet connection? It was unclear from the website.
That page is… a lot, on mobile.
Here’s the tech specs page, which is also busy: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/press-kit/
I've tried a few small robot kits and every single one fails the moment it reaches even moderately deep carpet. Either the size of motion doesn't clear the carpet or the motors aren't strong enough to deal with it. The living room is a small robots sand trap. Couldn't help but notice precious little carpet in any of the promo material. What's the point of a robot buddy if you cant play with it in the living room?
Is there an app for Microduck, or is it currently controlled/programmed directly through the SDK? I’d be interested to know if there’s a mobile app for basic control and setup.
This is a dust magnet after the first few days of excitement. An expensive dust magent.
Hmm first I thought it’s just $400 but with shipping 30 and duties 80 it’s more like $510
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think magnetically aligned physical pin connections are better. Charge faster, generate less heat, and better for the battery. Wireless charging is cool, but not sure why it would need to be wireless in this case.
climbing stairs was my first question. But looking at its size, I dont think it will be able to
How much does it cost to train a new behaviour?
Why not foster a dog instead?
I have enough things to take care of in my life through training and reinforcement learning, but if you don’t - this might be for you! :)
Robots don’t die if you forget to feed them, and don’t get depressed if you don’t get around to taking them for walks. They also don’t need to be trained not to pee or poop in the house, not to bark at the mailman, etc.
Interesting that they're using Dynamixel instead of Feetech for the servos. More expensive but better quality. I'm surprised it still comes in under $400.
All AI images, a robot with no arms. Please improve on both. I will happily train one to pick things up and away with and after kids.
Just use the beak?
I would like it to pick up shoes, clothes etc. Not sure the beak would work, it would block the camera and prevent the bot from walking forward. Presumably, it could walk backwards and drag clothes, but anything rigid might block the camera.
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.
wonder how it compares to https://github.com/apirrone/Open_Duck_Mini (besides being a lot easier to put together)
He works at Pollen, so that was the inspiration for it pre-product.
video was pure non-stop static
I couldn’t find hardware open source. If only I could 3d print and build it myself, that would be hell of a project.
Did anyone get programming in the simulator to work?
And why don't they show the video feed as seen by the camera?
i wonder if this is the reason why those little dynamixel motors have been out of stock for months. (i use them in my robots at tapster.)
Does it work locally? I don't want to have a camera robot in child's room
Yes! At least Reachy can be run fully offline so don’t see why Ducky can’t
The Sony Aibo we never got
Perfect for kids; especially great that it doesn't come with a display by default.
Cute, and quite something if the sim-to-real pipeline is as smooth as we all might hope.
Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szW7N_7B3tU
neat! since its written in rust, why not use https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2 for ipc?
Because now you're locked into the Rust ecosystem.
JSONRPC over Unix sockets is a better interface for language agnostic IPC.
It looks cool no doubt, but i would be concerned about privacy.
Well all of the operations are local and on-board, so unless you explicitly send your data somewhere, privacy shouldn't be a concern.
If it’s anything like Reachy, can run it fully offline inc inference
What is the battery life?
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.
Since it's programmable, I guess one could tinker with it to do just that?
And can it walk back to a charge station and hook itself up?
Add a hack to repurpose a phone wireless charger pad?
My main question is if it would be able to find its way back.
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.
You can train it to do pretty much anything.
You can train deep learning to do anything. But the question is ... will it do it? And the next question: how reliably?
I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.
What about the animals that have been domesticated to be pets? It's arguable that their native habitat is the home at this point. Although, I do hope we stop capturing the animals which aren't domesticated (most "exotic" pets).
I agree with the horror of pulling animals out of their natural habitat, but if you are using this as a blanket statement towards all living animals then you should read up on the history of the domestication of wolves (dogs). It was born of a beneficial relationship to both humans and wolves and i personally find my relationship with my dogs to be extremely fulfilling and i believe my dogs do as well.
I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I know the history. We bred them to be our pets and normalized this relationship. Your pet might even love his life. But we can do the same with robot AIs, and it will be a better relationship. Your robot can talk to you. It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.
I'd argue that emotional co-regulation is born out of biological origins. Unless we are making synth, it would be a long time to match the relationship with a living creature.
> it will be a better relationship.
There are many many people for whom that will never be close to the same, let alone better. An immortal sack of wires that is passed down through generations is interesting and will appeal to many, but it’s not automatically a “better” relationship than a living creature.
> Your robot can talk to you.
If you want a conversation, may I suggest another person instead of a pet?
> It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.
If you want a way to automatically call 911, how about a smartwatch that tracks your vitals and does just that?
Anyway, stories of pets calling 911 are a dime a dozen.
https://blog.animalreskue.com/guide-dog-saves-blind-owner-by...
> I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I think I could, if it meant I could keep the experience of having a pet.
I've had cats going back to my twenties. I dearly love my fifteen y/o cat. She's my last cat, though. As I approach fifty I've grown tired of hefting bags of litter and food, stooping to clean up after her, taking her to the vet, and administering her medication.
When she's finally dead (which is hopefully not for a good long time) I'm not going to get another. This makes me really sad. I'll miss having a cat around. As I age, though, I don't want the encumbrance of taking care of a pet, nor do I want to cause hardship to family if I suddenly become unable to care for a pet (dying, being hospitalized, living arrangement changes and owning a pet isn't allowed, etc).
If there was a robot alternative I'd jump on it. I think my brain would adjust fine to a convincingly-executed robotic cat. Our brains instinctively ascribe agency to objects moving in non-inertial frames, for example. Think about all the people who name their Roomba, install googly eyes on it, etc. People easily accept inanimate objects that behave like living things, to the point of developing feelings for them.
When my cat is gone I hope to get the opportunity to choose a "relationship" with a convincing robotic cat versus not having one at all.
I wouldn't expect everyone to feel this way. I certainly don't want to legislate away pet ownership.
I bet that, if good robotic pets become available, we'll see a significant number of people favoring them over living pets for convenience, long-term cost, freedom from anxiety about the pet's health and eventual death, and the opportunity for companionship in living arrangements where pets aren't allowed.
I've said, for years, that I think there's hundreds of billions of dollars for the company who can make really good robotic pets. If somebody can get the "soft robotics" down and build / train good animal behavior models I think they'll be able to print money.
Interesting how all of the replies so far to your comment assume we’d just release the existing animals into the wild instead of just not breeding more.
> instead of just not breeding more
As one might guess, the "just" there is doing a lot of work.
Common pets reproduce just fine without our intervention - in practice it requires costly maintenance programs just to keep their population under control (not to mention the massive and ongoing eugenics program required to produce only the desirable breeds/attributes).
If your neighbourhood isn't overrun with stray cats and dogs, that's because someone is funding a spay/neuter program, and someone is funding animal control to round up (and ultimately euthanise) the rest.
All animal husbandry systems have to be maintained via regular culling, and "eliminating" pets would require orders of magnitude more killing
I always assumed the "enslaved animal-free" future would be something that came on gradually, likely motivated by economics (i.e. lab-grown meat becoming cheaper and higher quality than farmed, robotic pets being cheaper and more "trouble-free", etc).
I never felt like anybody seriously thought we'd release domestic animals into the wild to fend for themselves-- that's ludicrous.
yup!
Spoiler this will end with people having robot sheep, cows, horses, ostriches, toads, and more exotic pets (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Release the dogs and cats! You are free to roam! Ill think i need to buy dogg pound stock!
> look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats
Somehow, vegan-inclined folks never seem to factor in the mass-genocide of domestic breeds that is necessary to achieve their particular utopia. We're talking 1.5 billion pets, 5 billion livestock, and 28 billion poultry - none of which are remotely able to survive on their own in the wild.
Wait... do you really think that if everyone goes vegan these animals will get killed, but if everyone eats them they won't?
You are aware that all of these livestock animals didn't exist a few months to years ago? And that we go through these animals every couple months-years?
Everyone going vegan would just mean we'd stop repleneshing them.
I detest the vegan movement. I'm not an animal lover. Pets are unsanitary nuisances. Robots are better. We don't need to commit a genocide against domestic pets for the transition. Just breed less.
that's so cute how it roller skates
what a nice platform, i would love this to patrole my house and have some fun.
I genuinely could not tell if this was a parody/satire or not, I think because the aesthetic reminds me of how a product like this would be presented in a horror movie or something
Trying to open the website turned my gaming laptop into a 747.
This has got to stop.
Made in China with a 500% markup. No thanks, I will wait for the Chinese version for less than $100.
AI is coming for pet market too.
AI is taking all the fun jobs. Now also for pets.
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.
Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
> These pets are domesticated.
Undoubtedly true.
> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.
> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all
That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.
On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.
> Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild
Natural selection has little to do with how pets are bred. The criteria their genes are being selected for by breeders have nothing to do with optimizing their happiness and more with what maximizes profit (which only losely relates to owner happiness).
Incidentally, lots of domesticated cats could survive in the wild just fine, just like lots of somewhat functional dog breeds. But that has nothing to do with whether the conditions keep them in are still painful to them.
Most humans can't survive in the wild. Put any of them in solitary confinement and you will see how much natural selection has done for them. We are social animals, just like dogs.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
No, because it is a human that has human rights. Which include the right to live. (Arguably they should have the right to decide the end of their life too, but religios groups are still having a strong grip on laws about that.) Animals don't. A friend of mine is a vet for farm animals and she always gets angry about how people treat their suffering pets. Cow has a painful broken leg? Bolt through brain, suffering ends immediately. Same with similarly injured sheep, goats, etc. No point in letting them suffer unnecessarily. Already horses are special because people get attached and sometimes they are worth tons of money so people rather pump them full with antibiotics. But dogs and cats? Man, people attach wheels to the lower end of dogs so they can keep their beloved buddy for another 2 years, even though that poor thing can't even go for a pee anymore. You can see owners drag their terminally ill dog through the streets which has clearly lost all will to live. We let pets suffer much more than cows or goats and it's cuel.
I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles.
Now that Nvidia owns huggingface, I fear their days being able to support open source products are over.
i don't think they do. i think they are trying still to get approval to acquire huggingface.
thought this said something else at first
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.
Its not https://github.com/pollen-robotics/microduck
What would be so bad about relying on ROS in any way?
One horrifying facts I've read about it is that ROS1 is completely non-realtime and non-deterministic, so much so that its ROSBAG data logs aren't time or sequence accurate. So you can collect the sensor inputs and simulate programmatic behavior, but it's acucrate only if you were lucky. And everyone has to either use it or devote massive amount of resource recreating it right way because there's just immense amount of useful packages available for ROS.
That is sick
Ugh, PAL only? I'll wait for the NTSC version.
It's not worth it if you can't have a swarm of them that debate philosophy in their off time.
They have another non-duck model called Reachy Mini that has 4 microphones and an onboard raspberry pi + wifi + camera on board for dev. And, their reachy mini lite is pc controlled instead. Is that what you wanted?
"Have a conversation with Reachy! Powered by LLMs, it understands what you say and responds with expressive movements and speech."
I'm guessing you could have a bunch talking to each other. And, if you wanted them to non-verbally communicate with one another there's a morse-code app for it that can listen to taps / beeps. They have a TTS app, and they even have claude integration.
I'm not giving it that freedom. The limit of my interaction with it will be
It: "What is my purpose?"
Me: "You pass butter."
It: "Oh My God"
Like the Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell franchise?
Who says you can’t have a swarm
Certainly not OpenAI, the swarm is evolving under their roof as we speak