pollen-robotics/microduck

Microduck

A tiny biped robot that moves using reinforcement learning policies.

Get yours here · Cheat sheet · Training the policies · How it works · Contributing

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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.

Everything you need to run a Microduck is here. If you want one, get yours here.

The policies it runs are trained next door, in microduck_rl — MuJoCo and PPO, the sim2real recipe, and the export to ONNX that this repo loads.

It does things

It also sits, kicks a ball, rolls forward on command, and quacks in a voice that is its own.

Where to find things

You have a duck

| | | |---|---| | Cheat sheet | Every robotctl command: drive, configure, voice, chorale, theremin, wifi, updates, logs. Start here. | | Gamepad | The full button mapping, and pairing a pad — once per pad, plus what to do when it will not bond. | | duckctl | The robot from a laptop over Bluetooth, with no network and no ssh. | | Updates | Install, roll back, pin. Every update is verified, health-gated and reversible. |

You are building on it

| | | |---|---| | microduck_rl | Where the policies come from: MuJoCo, PPO, domain randomisation, and the ONNX export this repo loads. | | How it works | The whole system on one page — the daemons, the bus, how an update reaches a robot — then a page per part. | | Set up a dev board | From a blank board to a robot that takes branch builds. | | Dev cheat sheet | Branch builds, release candidates, driving from a laptop, and the restart traps after an update. | | Push your branch | Build on your machine, install over ssh, about a minute. | | The simulated duck | No robot on the desk? scripts/duck-sim runs the real daemons against a body in MuJoCo — one duck in a window, or four as machines you log into. | | CONTRIBUTING.md | Building, testing, layout, conventions, releasing. | | Docs index | Everything, including the design pages and the open problems. |

Under the hood

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. They talk over one JSON-RPC contract on Unix sockets, and every client — the app, the console, the gamepad, your script — sends exactly the same calls.

The interesting decisions are written down: docs/design/ is why things are the way they are, and docs/project/ is what has gone wrong and what would close it.

A note on ducks

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