Microduck: a 25cm, 800g desk robot packing 15 motors, LiDAR and dual IMUs
Olivier__OG · x · 2026-10-24
Pollen Robotics' Microduck is a desktop robot standing just 25 cm tall and weighing under 800 g, yet it packs 15 motors, a Rockchip RK3566 processor, 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, a camera, LiDAR, and two IMUs.
The hard part is coordination: walking, balancing, moving head and neck, and manipulating objects requires controlling multiple joints while continuously reacting to the world.
The author argues small robots matter because they make Physical AI easy to experiment with outside the lab — you don't need a human-sized robot to explore serious embodied AI.
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