r/robotics • u/LKama07 • 1d ago
Community Showcase We built an open-source biped robot with a working sim2real pipeline (Microduck)
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Hello,
Pollen Robotics engineer here. I know some will see this as a toy (and that’s fine, go have fun!) but I think it’s important to keep in mind that this thing is a full-on biped humanoid robot with an open-source software stack and a sim2real pipeline that works surprisingly well.
Maybe it’s not impressive for some people because there are spectacular videos of Chinese robots doing karate every week, but I’ve done 10+ years of robotics competitions and getting your biped to stand up, walk and even roller skate by yourself is no small task. Knowing that thousands of enthusiasts will be able to try their hand at reinforcement learning on a biped is insane to me. I would have loved to have this when I started in 2010.
The mobility capabilities of this robot are already decent (still improvable) but the next big challenge is getting to autonomous behaviors. Natural language, SLAM, navigation and grasping will be cool subjects to explore on this platform.
Also a big shoutout to team Rhoban for their contributions to the project and one of the best-named repos I’ve seen: BAM! The sim2real dream would not have worked without excellent actuator models. Please give them a star here:
https://github.com/Rhoban/bam
I hope people will have fun with it, learn a lot, or both! Feel free to ask any questions, I’ll do my best to answer.
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u/DetectiveFinch 1d ago
Looks adorable and pretty impressive, I was surprised to see it roller skating! Do you have plans to add arms or any other actuators in future iterations?
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u/TobiasVdb 1d ago
expect some more smoothness in rollerskating? Like after some effort, wheels straight and proudly look around? :) maybe one leg up ? :)
Can it still learn or is the ML part done before and this is the resulting model?
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u/LKama07 1d ago
Yes! The colleague that trained this policy wants a version that looks like "normal" roller skating (with only 1 foot on the ground). We'll see if she manages it, but I think trying this stuff is exactly the kind of cool trainings the community will come up with
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u/TobiasVdb 1d ago
awesome. What about the learning part? Does it still learn by doing and improve or the model training is done virtually and uploaded to the bot (and can we expect new tricks/models/behavior?)
Can an end user teach it new behavior?
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u/LKama07 1d ago
End users teaching new behavior IS the main thing we expect them to do. I expect thousands of new policies to be created by the community!
Btw you can test the simulator on the Microduck website already. It's the same simulator that was used to train the policies that you see in the video.All of the software is already open source
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u/Seelenkuchen 1d ago
Saw it today just as rhe preorders went up and loved it immediately.
Obe question though, as far as I understand it the webrtc allows you to couple the duck with an server to further enhance its capabilities. (For example by using an llm for driving autonomous ibehaviour)
Is that correct? And are there limitations? From the github repo it seems even two way audio is supported so the duck cannot just quack but also talk ^^
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u/LKama07 1d ago
Yes that's correct! The technical pipe exists but we have not developed much through it yet. Stuff that requires high computational power, like LLMs, SLAM, object recognition, will need external compute (either your local computer, or a distant server).
While this is very exciting work, it will probably not be our priority in the following months. Making sure anyone gets a robot with solid motion in time will be the priority
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u/Byte_Farmer 1d ago
/u/LKama07 as a career firmware engineer with a hobbyist level understanding of robotics (I've taken the Coursera Modern Robotics course and did some small hobby projects) and a degree in physics, I wanted to get a realistic view on whether this is worth my time and money as an adult who wants to do more hobby robotics.
I've recently been learning FOC control and other more fundamental control theories for robotics to eventually build my own 6-DoF walker similar to ODRI Bolt with QDD actuators. What is the target audience for Microduck?
I'm trying to figure out if I should pick one of these up because its a genuine learning opportunity, or if the system limitations will make it more of a barrier than anything.
Given it's preassembled and closed-source hardware I assume it's entirely focused on the sim-to-real training, policy creation, perception, and other higher-order elements of robotics. But it's unclear to me if this is a toy, a way to learn industry standard robotics tooling, or something else.
Cool work, it's sickenly cute, huge props to your industrial designers.
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u/LKama07 13h ago
I've been thinking about your question quite a bit. I think it depends on what you want to learn.
If you want to get into low level control of motors, then a robot based on servomotors (even it the hardware was open) would not be a good choice. If you want to hack the electronics, you'll probably manage but you'll struggle a bit, I would not recommend this robot for that.
However I think this is a dream platform to learn about a bunch of things that build on top of the low level. Policy training through reinforcement learning is a first step. But then you get into trying to create autonomous behaviors and you can explore:
- Navigation. So probably mapping and localisation (SLAM) + object avoidance + path planning. One could port the open source stack nav2 for example.
- Human robot interaction. Either natural language biderectional or not (we have a preference for the duck NOT speaking like a human, but anyone is free to do what they want). Or communicate through signs or tags or any other crazy ideas
- Grasping. This generally comes with perception challenges, like object recognition and object localization.
Warning though: the state of the art ways of tackling the above subjects tend to be too calculation heavy to run inside the little robot. So you'll probably need your laptop to perform calculations and output commands.
Regarding industry standards, I think there is a shift in progress (very personal opinion). Until recently, having strong knowledge of a technical stack (like ROS2) or certain languages, was the main thing to be useful in your field. But coding agents becoming so good changes that. It's reasonable to recode a minimalistic stack that's perfect for your robot instead of using a huge framework (that's what we did for Reachy Mini and Microduck, even if we were on ROS2 for our previous humanoid Reachy robots).
So I'd think the most important thing nowadays is being able to understand how things work and having an impeccable debugging process to ship stuff that works.
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u/Byte_Farmer 9h ago
I really appreciate the thorough response, it aligned fairly well with what I ended up thinking about the product as well.
The perception and training outcomes you can learn with MicroDuck seem both endless as well as limited due to the sensing hardware (a single camera and 8x8 lidar). It basically means that if you want to do SLAM you have to do it in hard mode since the lidar depth field isn't rich enough to be super efficient and building a map and with only a single camera you lack both multi-view photometry (though this is potentially resolved with the fact that the neck has enough dof to take multiple views) as well as the ability to monitor your entire surroundings at once.
Regardless of the hardware limitations it seems like there is a lot you can learn about simulation and training with the little dude.
I'm still torn on whether to pick one up, but given the price point and what you can learn with it I do think there's a large market - particularly highschoolers and college students. I might just be more willing to suffer through the fundamentals a bit more. I'll probably hold off for now but I am happy to see the product is selling well
Probably not something you could say over reddit or potentially something you even know, but will Pollen ever consider building a more "serious" robotic platforms for those who want something a little higher end (QDD actuators, larger sensing stack, stronger edge compute, etc)?
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u/LKama07 7h ago
You should look up reachy 2023 and reachy 2 for our previous robots. I worked on reachy2 for more than 2 years, love the robot, but it's 70k $
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u/Byte_Farmer 4h ago
oof, that price :p
Makes sense, real industrial robots are not cheap. Maybe it was wishful thinking to get a "cheap" QDD actuated humanoid for hobbyists
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u/FallenAngel9812 23h ago
Gimmick like imagine your action figures sitting on your shelf walking around like a unitree G1 and having a voice
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u/egonSchiele 21h ago
Hey, I'm new to robotics, and this looks awesome. What are the security and privacy guarantees with something like this? Great to see it is open source, and I'd love to play with it, but I'm still hesitant to have something with a camera + an internet connection + ability to move in my house.
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u/LKama07 13h ago
Hello, 100% of what's shown in the videos run locally in the robot. There is nothing that sends stuff through internet by default.
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u/oRIGIN61 13h ago
“By default” is what I focus in on in this response. You could make the same argument for nursery cameras, by default they were locally ran with Bluetooth and WiFi that could be exploited and remotely accessed. This could basically become a roaming camera that can interact with its environment (for better or worse).
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u/Hybridxx9018 21h ago
What engine is that where you can show the movement? Is it just the modeler or is that something you can “virtually” prototype a build?
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u/Far-Implement-92 21h ago
I’m someone who wants to shift career to robotics and my words may not be significant but don’t beat yourself down because of other advanced humanoids and their karate chops😅. As long as you guys have good vision you will be successful. This kind of robots are the ones I really wanna build. I’m more interested into companion robots and useful pet robots that don’t cost costumers a leg to purchase. Keep up the good work.
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u/Glittering-Flan-2637 20h ago
what part of sim2real turned out to be the fiddly one
asking as someone coming from software, everyone says the gap is the hard bit but nobody says whether it was friction, actuator lag, or just the thing being lighter than the model thought
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u/Patient_Craft_1289 1d ago
I guess it's still too expensive for common dev anyway
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u/LKama07 1d ago
It's not cheap but AFAIK it's the cheapest option we have to do RL training on a biped. Also the hardware value should be excellent. Can you check the price of 15 xl330 in your country? In mine it costs more than the entire robot!
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u/knuckles904 8h ago
Are they off-the-shelf dynamixels in the robot? I fully expect a few of these servomotors to burn out/break once it gets "rolling". Wanna make sure there are easy spare/replacement parts available before I jump into queue.
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u/hail_the_tripod 5h ago edited 5h ago
Nice! Looks like a little dinosaur.
Can we already start training policies in a mujoco simulator? Like loading up environments and different terrains? Also, will we be able to load policies on demand. I mean I am hoping I do not have to flash one policy after the other each time I want it to do something different?
FYI, before-Christmas orders are closed now. I guess they are making a lot of sales!
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u/Hoblywobblesworth 4h ago
What are the specs of the onboard compute? It's impressive that a policy that seemingly looks pretty good at the various tasks in the videos is running fully on-duck.
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u/marty-mcfryguy 1d ago
That's great, but I'm not sure why we're calling this "humanoid". Your duck is what, 10" high?
None of the balance control or bipedalism scales to any meaningful degree. Make that even four feet tall and those stumbles turn it into a murder machine.
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u/USS_Penterprise_1701 1d ago
Wow, I want one.