AI-FanGe's Microduck Lets You 3D Print a Walking Robot for Under $400
A hobbyist published a full DIY build kit for a Microduck-style RL biped robot, complete with a prebuilt SD image and MuJoCo training environment.
PRO- AI-FanGe published Microduck-build-tutorial, a DIY build guide for a Microduck-style RL biped robot.
- Includes 3D print files, BOM, wiring diagrams, and a prebuilt
microduck.img.xzSD card image. - Runs on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with 14 Dynamixel XL330 servos driven via an OpenRB-150 board.
- Ships with an ONNX walking policy plus a MuJoCo/MjLab training environment to retrain it.
- Inspired by Pollen Robotics' $399 Microduck and Disney's BDX droid design.
- Supports keyboard control over SSH and headless Bluetooth gamepad operation out of the box.
A tiny walking duck robot just became a weekend project. A developer going by AI-FanGe has released Microduck-build-tutorial, a full hardware and software recipe for building a compact reinforcement-learning biped at home. The repo is a community replica of Pollen Robotics' Microduck, and it ships everything you need to go from a bag of servos to a walking robot loaded with an ONNX policy.
The reference design it copies is Pollen Robotics' Microduck (now part of Hugging Face), a 25 cm biped with 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR and a grasping beak, open-source, and priced at $399 for pre-order. The obvious comparison is Disney's BDX droid: same shrunken-biped look, same RL-in-simulation training idea, but with no way to buy one. This project lets you skip the pre-order entirely by 3D printing and wiring one yourself.
What's actually in the box
The repo is split into two halves. microduck/ holds the deployment code that runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, reads the IMU, drives Dynamixel servos through an OpenRB-150 controller, and loads a
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