Small-format robots
There seems to be something about small-format robots. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I’m seeing them everywhere. I think it’s a combination of two factors.
First, Disney really tapped into something with the BD-1 droid in the game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. People fell in love with this little droid. So much so, that Disney Imagineering actually put some considerable resources behind creating real life versions of it. That seemed to just light a match under anyone with interest and/or ability to want to make one of their very own. Second, this interest comes at a time when many people have access to 3D printers and relatively inexpensive electronic components, making a build of a similar robot increasingly practical.
And it's not just hobbyists taking an interest. I happened across this video on YouTube, This $400 Robot Duck Might Be a Bigger Deal Than It Looks (Explaining the MicroDuck Hype). Looking beyond the crazy long title 🙃, there's an interesting connection here. Pollen Robotics, which built the $399 MicroDuck, is owned by Hugging Face (of AI hacking "fame") and Nvidia recently said it agreed to acquire Hugging Face. It doesn't get much bigger than that.
It also turns out that Antoine Pirrone, the guy behind the Open_Duck_Mini project, works at Pollen. So there’s a real sense of an open-source community growing around these smaller robots, with connections between hobby projects and commercial tech companies.
But just because they're small doesn't mean there isn't real robotics going on here. People from all kinds of backgrounds are starting to explore sims, reinforcement learning (RL) and policies in order to train their "ducks" (as many call these small-format robots) to walk in various conditions.
I’ll be watching to see what kinds of physical builds and capabilities people come up with as they continue to explore this accessible area of robotics.