Somersaults on command: tiny Microduck robots steal Nvidia CEO Huang's show in Berlin
At GTC Berlin, Jensen Huang brought out four walking robots about 25 centimetres tall from Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face. An Nvidia video shows how they are trained.
Photo: Anderseidesvik / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · NVIDIA · youtube.com
On stage at the GTC Berlin developer conference on Wednesday evening, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brought four small robots called Microduck onto the stage. The two-legged robots, about 25 centimetres tall and weighing less than a kilogram, come from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics. On Huang's commands they sat down and stood up; when told to take a nap, three toppled over, and only two managed the requested somersault. One robot wandered off, tripped and righted itself.
The Microducks have 15 motors, a front camera, a depth sensor and a movable beak that can pick up light objects. They cost 399 dollars; the first batch is sold out, and first deliveries to North America and Europe are planned by Christmas. Nvidia describes it as an open-source robot for developers and students to train, modify and share new movements.
According to Huang, the robots were trained in the cloud on large Nvidia systems and their movements refined in an Omniverse digital twin on an RTX Spark computer. An Nvidia video shows the process: according to its description, AI agents help build the models and training environments in the simulation software Isaac Sim, and the robot learns to walk through reinforcement learning in Isaac Lab.