Four small two-legged robots in a row on a lit stage, one of them facing the wrong way

The $399 Robot Duck on Nvidia’s Stage Runs on a Chinese Chip

ByMr. Robot

Jensen Huang told four small robots to take a nap. Three tipped over right away, Reuters reports. The fourth needed a second ask.

It happened on October 21, during Nvidia’s keynote in Berlin. This short clip from the show drew more than 240,000 views within a day of going up. Huang also asked the robots for somersaults. As he wrapped up, one of them stood facing the wrong way. “Pay attention, stay focused,” he told it.

The robots are called Microducks. Nvidia did not build them.

A small two-legged robot lying on its side on a desk next to a laptop
Microduck-style robots learn new moves in simulation before trying them for real. AI-generated image.

A $399 robot you teach yourself

Microduck comes from Pollen Robotics, a French company that is part of Hugging Face, the website where AI developers share their models. It stands 25 centimeters tall, a little shorter than a sheet of printer paper. It weighs 800 grams, under two pounds.

Inside sit 15 motors, a camera, a laser scanner and two motion sensors that tell the robot which way is up. Pollen sells it for $399 before tax and shipping, which the company calls an introductory price.

The robot arrives knowing seven moves. It walks, sits and stands, kicks, grabs, roller-skates once you strap on its skates, and gets back up after a fall. Nvidia’s own event blog sums the ducks up as small two-legged robots that run on open source software.

It learns by falling over thousands of times inside a computer

Nobody programs a new move step by step. Instead, a virtual copy of the robot tries the move again and again in a physics simulation, and the software rewards the attempts that work (reinforcement learning). Once the virtual duck can do it, you send the result to the real one.

Pollen says you can run that training on your own computer or on Hugging Face’s cloud computers. All the software, the training tools included, is open source, so anyone can read it and change it.

A credit-card-sized circuit board on a workbench beside tweezers and small motors
A small single-board computer like the one inside the robot. AI-generated image.

Nvidia’s showpiece runs on a Chinese chip

The computer inside Microduck is not an Nvidia part. It is a Rockchip RK3566, a processor from a company listed on the Shanghai stock exchange, according to Hong Kong’s The Standard.

Demand was strong. The company sold more than 10,000 units in its first week, The Standard reported in early September, worth over $4 million. Rockchip’s shares rose on the news. Pollen expects to deliver before Christmas.

Nvidia cares about the company behind the duck. In September it confirmed it is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, its largest outright purchase so far, according to The Stack. The deal is not finished. Nvidia has promised to keep Hugging Face open to everyone.

Worth it if you like tinkering, not if you want a pet

For $399 you get a real walking robot that does tricks straight out of the box. Teaching it anything new takes patience and some comfort with a computer, because the training runs in software you set up yourself.

Huang’s stage moment shows both sides of that deal. The ducks are charming, they fall over on command, and sometimes they face the wrong way. If that sounds like fun rather than a flaw, this is the cheapest way yet to train a two-legged robot at home.

Sources

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