| ▲ | Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face) Microduck(pollen-robotics.com) |
| 142 points by robotswantdata 3 hours ago | 45 comments |
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| ▲ | _joel an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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%. |
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| ▲ | neom 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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) | |
| ▲ | Philip-J-Fry 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | serf 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I believe the Microduck camera footage (the ad - reel) about 1000x more than the Mondo one. | | |
| ▲ | quadrature 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | unglaublich 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Will Beni/monodorobotics have open source software, or at least a hackable stack? |
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| ▲ | telecuda 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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/ |
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| ▲ | utopiah 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Waiting for robot vacuum cleaners to come with extension ports where you can add fun robot actuators. |
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| ▲ | martianvoid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | cs1996 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/ |
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| ▲ | utopiah 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This "with emotions like a living creature" should just not be allowed. | | |
| ▲ | kodoman an hour ago | parent [-] | | why not? | | |
| ▲ | dgellow an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | Isamu 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | How about “this duck fakes positive emotions like we all do from time to time” | |
| ▲ | kodoman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | kodoman 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ForHackernews 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 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.) |
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| ▲ | tokai an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | tokai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Its not even close to being the same product. | |
| ▲ | ahoka 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Finally an AI slop I can keep as a pet. I hate this dystopia. |
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| ▲ | Mxbonn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | k3liutZu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My wife would love one of these. She's still bitter we didn't get the Sony dog a decade ago. |
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| ▲ | Depurator 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| neat! since its written in rust, why not use https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2 for ipc? |
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| ▲ | Philip-J-Fry 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Because now you're locked into the Rust ecosystem. JSONRPC over Unix sockets is a better interface for language agnostic IPC. |
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| ▲ | Gannon6790 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm wanna train some to chase after turtles. |
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| ▲ | unprovable 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cute, and quite something if the sim-to-real pipeline is as smooth as we all might hope. |
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| ▲ | tietjens 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What is the battery life? |
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| ▲ | world2vec an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | And can it walk back to a charge station and hook itself up? | | |
| ▲ | dv_dt an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Add a hack to repurpose a phone wireless charger pad? | | |
| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent [-] | | My main question is if it would be able to find its way back. | | |
| ▲ | _flux 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | tenuousemphasis an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can train it to do pretty much anything. | | |
| ▲ | amelius 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You can train deep learning to do anything. But the question is ... will it do it? And the next question: how reliably? |
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| ▲ | SomeonesAccount an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That is sick |
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| ▲ | jCalamari 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AI is coming for pet market too. |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent [-] | | AI is taking all the fun jobs. Now also for pets. | | |
| ▲ | teiferer 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | snalty an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Ugh, PAL only? I'll wait for the NTSC version. |
