Microduck Robots Waddle, Stumble, and Recover During Jensen Huang’s GTC Berlin Keynote

Jensen Huang stood on the GTC Berlin stage Wednesday evening with four small biped robots from French company Pollen Robotics arrayed in front of him. Standing roughly ten inches tall and weighing under two pounds each, the Microducks had already drawn attention when they walked out under their own power. Huang greeted them casually, asked if they could sit, then told them to stand again. When he ordered them to take a nap, three promptly toppled over onto the floor. The fourth kept walking a few more steps before eventually joining the others on its side.

Huang laughed and coaxed them back upright. He pointed out that the robots had been trained in the cloud on large NVIDIA systems and refined their movements inside an Omniverse digital twin running on an RTX Spark machine. Then he asked for a somersault. A couple of the Microducks managed the roll, while the others needed extra encouragement or simply stayed put. One wandered a bit farther away, tripped, and righted itself. Huang called it over with a firm “Pay attention. Stay focused. Come here.” The robot eventually approached and sat, prompting more laughter from the room.

Each microduck contains 15 motors dispersed between its legs, neck, and head, as well as a front camera, depth sensor, and two small inertial measurement units. An articulated beak allows it to pick up relatively light objects from the ground with ease. Out of the box, these robots can wander around like a drunken sailor (waddle is the polite term), sit, crouch, bounce back from falls, and even roller-skate if you attach some wheels.

Their entire software stack is open source, including low-level control, simulation environments, and the RL tools they employed in MuJoCo to teach the machines new skills before releasing them into the real world. Pollen Robotics, which has now merged with Hugging Face, designed the platform so that even inexperienced developers can experiment with these devices at home or in the classroom without breaking the bank.

Huang took advantage of the opportunity to remind everyone that Europe has traditionally excelled at producing highly precision-engineered products, and these microducks are a wonderful example. To be fair, there was just a brief window to buy at the initial price of $399 before taxes and shipping, and they’ve already sold out, with first shipments expected to arrive by Christmas in North America and Europe. The four colors, Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky, arrived as a group that felt more like a cast of characters than identical machines.