Microduck robot duck passed 20,000 preorders after the Nvidia keynote - 399 dollar robotics kit or viral toy?
After Jensen Huang played with a flock of them on stage at GTC Berlin, preorders for the Microduck robot passed 20,000 in a day, according to Hugging Face. It is a 25 centimetre open-source duck robot from Pollen Robotics, it waddles, sits, falls over for a nap and somersaults on voice command, and owners can train new tricks and share them. It costs 399 dollars before taxes and shipping, with Christmas delivery promised, and it is being talked about as a possible holiday hit. I like the idea of a robot you can actually teach, but 399 dollars is a lot for a duck that falls over. Is this a genuinely good starter kit for learning robotics, or is it mostly a viral toy that will gather dust by February? What would you want to see in a review before ordering one?
2 answers
- Wait for one real review first
I love the video, I am just not spending 399 dollars on a video. A duck that waddles and falls over is adorable for about a week, and the whole pitch is that you can teach it new tricks, which means the fun depends on software and a community that barely exists yet. Wait for someone who is not selling it to show what it does after a month of actual use, how long the battery lasts, and whether it survives a fall off a table. If those reviews are good, Christmas delivery is still fine.
- 399 dollars buys the training, not the duck
The price makes sense only if you compare it with the right thing. Trainable humanoid kits run 1,700 dollars and up, while this is 399 dollars for a 25 centimetre robot with 15 motors, a camera and a depth sensor that you can retrain and share tricks with. If you just want a cute desk toy, it is overpriced. If you want to learn how simulation training becomes real movement without spending four figures, the open-source part is the whole value. Check whether the software runs on a machine you already own before you preorder.