Microduck
A tiny biped robot that moves using reinforcement learning policies.
Get yours here · Cheat sheet · Training the policies · How it works · Contributing
This repo is the duck's brain. About 25 cm and 800 g of robot, run by a handful of daemons on a Rockchip RK3566: a 50 Hz control loop driving fifteen servos from neural policies, the radios and the camera, and the update machinery that gets new software onto a robot without bricking it.
Everything you need to run a Microduck is here. If you want one, get yours here.
The policies it runs are trained next door, in microduck_rl — MuJoCo and PPO, the sim2real recipe, and the export to ONNX that this repo loads.
It does things
It walks. Pick up a gamepad and drive.
It rolls. Put wheels on, ask for roller mode, and it loads the other brain.
It picks things up. Beak to the floor, one button.
It gets back up. Knock it over and it stands itself up.
It also sits, kicks a ball, rolls forward on command, and quacks in a voice that is its own.
Where to find things
You have a duck
| Cheat sheet | Every robotctl command: drive, configure, voice, chorale, theremin, wifi, updates, logs. Start here. |
| Gamepad | The full button mapping, and pairing a pad — once per pad, plus what to do when it will not bond. |
duckctl |
The robot from a laptop over Bluetooth, with no network and no ssh. |
| Updates | Install, roll back, pin. Every update is verified, health-gated and reversible. |
You are building on it
| microduck_rl | Where the policies come from: MuJoCo, PPO, domain randomisation, and the ONNX export this repo loads. |
| How it works | The whole system on one page — the daemons, the bus, how an update reaches a robot — then a page per part. |
| Set up a dev board | From a blank board to a robot that takes branch builds. |
| Dev cheat sheet | Branch builds, release candidates, driving from a laptop, and the restart traps after an update. |
| Push your branch | Build on your machine, install over ssh, about a minute. |
| The simulated duck | No robot on the desk? scripts/duck-sim runs the real daemons against a body in MuJoCo — one duck in a window, or four as machines you log into. |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | Building, testing, layout, conventions, releasing. |
| Docs index | Everything, including the design pages and the open problems. |
Under the hood
Rust, no framework, one workspace. robotd owns the control loop and the motor bus; updaterd
installs signed releases and rolls them back when a robot comes up unhealthy; configd owns wifi
and identity; btd is the Bluetooth path a phone uses; padd reads the gamepad; mediad streams
the camera over WebRTC; tofd serves the depth sensor. They talk over one JSON-RPC contract on
Unix sockets, and every client — the app, the console, the gamepad, your script — sends exactly the
same calls.
The interesting decisions are written down: docs/design/ is why things are the
way they are, and docs/project/ is what has gone wrong and what would close it.
A note on ducks
No duck was harmed in the making of this robot. Several were consulted.