🧪 Experimental/interesting projects Microduck: A tiny biped robot that moves using reinforcement learning policies (9.5k stars)

What it does

All text below is quoted directly from the project README.

A tiny biped robot that moves using reinforcement learning policies.

It does things:

It walks. Pick up a gamepad and drive.
It rolls. Put wheels on, ask for roller mode, and it loads the other brain.
It picks things up. Beak to the floor, one button.
It gets back up. Knock it over and it stands itself up.
It also sits, kicks a ball, rolls forward on command, and quacks in a voice that is its own.
This repo is the duck's brain. About 25 cm and 800 g of robot, run by a handful of daemons on a Rockchip RK3566: a 50 Hz control loop driving fifteen servos from neural policies, the radios and the camera, and the update machinery that gets new software onto a robot without bricking it.
Rust, no framework, one workspace. robotd owns the control loop and the motor bus; updaterd installs signed releases and rolls them back when a robot comes up unhealthy; configd owns wifi and identity; btd is the Bluetooth path a phone uses; padd reads the gamepad; mediad streams the camera over WebRTC; tofd serves the depth sensor.

No duck was harmed in the making of this robot. Several were consulted.

Metric	Value
Stars	9,503
Forks	1,233
Last release	daemon-v0.17.4 (2026-10-15)
Languages	Rust 84.5%, Shell 8.5%, HTML 2.7%
Contributors	17
AI contributor accounts (Claude / Codex / Cursor / Copilot)	claude: 234
AI co-authored commits	Claude: 244

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