On August 31st, it seems that a lot of people want an inch about 10 inches tallrobotDuck。
It's FridayHugging Face The co-founder Thomas Wolf wrote on X thatMicroduck Within the first 24 hours of being listed, the consumer ' s order has exceeded US$ 2.6 million (note: the current exchange rate is approximately RMB 1,7539,000). Just on Thursday, about six hours after the product was released, Wolf revealed that Microduck's bookings had exceeded $1 million (the current exchange rate is about $6,746,000 yuan)。
Microduck, the $399 dollar (current exchange rate of approximately 2,692 yuan yuan), was officially presented on Thursdays of local time by the French robotics company Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired last year. Pollen Romanics plans to start delivering the first products around Christmas。
Now it seems that Microduck may have had a backlog of orders。
"The community ordered lots of ducks." According to a red banner at the top of Pollen Robotics' closing page, “We cannot guarantee that it will be delivered before Christmas, but we are accelerating production. Goods are shipped in the following order. New orders are currently expected to be delivered from 4 to 6 months.”
Microduck is also one of the broader industry trends that AI will take from chat robots to consumer-oriented physical equipment to enable robots to perform tasks that go beyond vacuuming。
CURRENTLY, THE ROBOTS CARRYING AI ARE MAINLY LIMITED TO RESEARCH LABORATORIES AND WORKSHOPS. BUT TODAY, COMPANIES, INCLUDING TESLA AND 1X, ARE EXPLORING HOW TO GET ROBOTS INTO ORDINARY CONSUMER HOMES, AND MODERN CARS EVEN OFFER THE IDEA OF SELLING ROBOTS THROUGH CAR DEALERS。
Microduck is the second consumer-oriented robot introduced by Pollen Robotics, after the company introduced the square design Reachy Mini. This is a desktop robot that needs to be assembled by the user. It can be programmed by the user for an AI-driven conversation, or for swinging the antenna. Both products are mainly for developers and robot lovers。
Hugging Face indicates that Microduck also supports programming. This robot has two legs and one eye, unlike a former product that can only stay on the table, and it can walk around on its own。
Microduck opens the box and completes walking, sitting, standing, playing small football and picking up small objects with a plastic mouth. Even if he falls, he can rise again. It can even slide on the ground if it has a combination of 39 United States dollars (at an exchange rate of approximately RMB 263.1)。
These actions are only the starting point for further development by the user. Developers can use a virtual version of Microduck in a physical simulator to train new actions through repeated mistests and then migrate trained behaviours to physical robots。
For example, Friday, Chief Executive Officer Clément Delangue posted a video on X showing this little robot completing a set of gymnastic exercises that users trained。
Other videos show the way the duck picks up small objects such as marks pens and socks。
When you train a new move, the developer can export it as an ONNX file and deploy it to his own robot. Pollen Robotics says that users can also “share your new behaviour with the community”。
Microduck is also equipped with cameras, laser radar (LiDAR) and two motion sensors that can be accessed by developers when they prepare their own software。
Microduck is powered by detached, rechargeable batteries, with a renewal time of approximately one hour depending on how it is used。
Just the day before the robot was released, Business Insider reported that the chip manufacturer, British Vida, was in the process of negotiating the acquisition of Hugging Face, and that the trade could have valued the AI start-up company at over $13 billion (the current exchange rate is approximately RMB 87,697 million)。