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Meet the Microduck
Previously, I wrote about Reachy, a desktop robot from Pollen Robotics in association with HuggingFace. That partnership has come up with a new kind of open-source robot — the Microduck. “At 25 cm tall, 14 cm wide and under 800 g, Microduck is built for the messy reality of reinforcement learning,” says the press release.
Reinforcement learning is a way that robots can learn to do something instead of being taught or programmed to do it. The key is that they can try a million ways until finding something that works. It’s like a child learning to walk and falling all the time until they figure it out. They call this kind of learned behavior a policy. They explain that doing reinforcement learning on the robot itself is slow. Their solution is to “train the robot in simulation and transfer the learned policy to the real world, known as sim-to-real transfer.”
A typical development loop looks like this: train in simulation (on your computer), deploy on the real-world robot, observe the behavior, refine the simulation parameters, repeat the process, share the policy with the community.
The results looks like a lot of fun but it should be fun for developers to train. There’s something a lot more playful with a robot that looks like an animal rather than a human. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from cartoon characters, the world of animation is a lot more fun and playful rather than “realistic” characters.
Microduck was designed to feel like more than just a robotics platform: dynamic, lively and expressive, with behaviors that make it engaging even before users start customizing. Its compact proportions and deliberately playful gait give it a distinctive waddle that reinforces its duck-like character.
Microduck’s camera, LiDAR and motion sensing let users create behaviors that react to people, objects and the surrounding environment, making interactions feel less scripted and more pet-like. A dedicated camera indicator, inspired by classic REC lights, turns on whenever the camera is active. At launch, Microduck will include perception-driven modes such as detecting and chasing a laser dot across the floor, much like a cat.
from press release
The Microduck robot will sell for $399 and will be available by Christmas from Pollen Robotics.
Rocket Eggs at Maker Faire Yukon
This weekend’s Maker Faire Yukon takes place at latitude 60°00′ N in Canada. It is organized by Yukonstruct, an innovation hub and makerspace. Producer Rick Yorgason told us they have a lot planned for both days, including a Cyberpunk Ball, an LED and blacklight fueled costume party.
Rick said that “some of our events and booths definitely have a northern edge, like making your own birdcage awl out of chainsaw files and antler.” (I like that a guy named Bob Sharp is teaching “Tool Making.”)
“One of the unique activities we like to run is something called Rocket Eggs,” said Rick. “It’s like an egg drop, but the egg is on a CO2-powered sled, so the challenge is to see how fast you can make your egg go without breaking it.
Find out more about Maker Faire Yukon on Makezine.com.
AI as a Medium is the message
Tim O’Reilly wrote a really interesting essay on Writing with AI. While some writers are defiantly turning away from AI, and others are embarrassed to admit they use it, O’Reilly is using it in interesting ways, and he sees “AI as a medium.”
I say AI is a medium, like painting, sculpture, photography, music, or language itself. If AI is a medium, it is a field of possibility from which humans can and will summon up and communicate insights, truth, beauty.
— Tim O’Reilly
I heard someone recently point out that film is about a hundred years old as a medium and look what’s been done in that time in terms of craft, artistic vision and yes, commercialization. O’Reilly thinks “it will take time for its possibilities to unfold, discovery on discovery.”
He adds:
If AI is a medium, the idea that you can’t write with it will someday seem as odd as the idea that you can’t make a good portrait or landscape with a camera, only with paint or pen and ink. Technical innovations have often changed the nature of art.
One might expect this medium to be a collaborative art, the way film is, but also empower the individual creator. Who will be the creators and makers experimenting and failing but also finding out something that others have not — the techniques, the forms, the new uses for interactivity, and new forms of expression — and what they could create that others were unable to create previously?
The “medium is the message” is a phrase from Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” Technology alters the scale and shape of human communication and its associated social patterns.
Anouk Wipprecht - F1 trophy maker
Dutch designer/maker Anouk Wipprecht, a fashion favorite of Maker Faire Bay Area, designed and made the trophy for the Dutch Grand Prix last week, as she writes on LinkedIn.
Last Sunday, the trophy I designed for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix with Royal Delft at Zandvoort was lifted on the podium by Lando Norris - and seeing something that started as ideas, sketches, polygons, electronics and a lot of problem-solving become part of that moment was pretty surreal.
I soldered, engineered and coded these trophies with my own hands 🔩⚙️🔧 And alongside Julia Huijer, Joffrey Walonker, Mischa, and Royal Delft’s masterpainter Laurens, we worked on this for almost 6 months.
Adapted from the Make Things newsletter.
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