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Microduck

pollen-robotics.com

121–130 of 415 posts

Re: Microduck

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't believe that all pet animals are having a great life. Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way o…

Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild. Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

> These pets are domesticated.

Undoubtedly true.

> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.

Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.

> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all

That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.

> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.

On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.

Re: Microduck

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting, could you elaborate on what you do with?

Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot. It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes,…

Huh, that's pretty cool! How much of that behavior did you need to roll yourself vs what was already there?

Re: Microduck

#124
Interesting that they're using Dynamixel instead of Feetech for the servos. More expensive but better quality. I'm surprised it still comes in under $400.

Re: Microduck

#125
All AI images, a robot with no arms. Please improve on both. I will happily train one to pick things up and away with and after kids.

Re: Microduck

#126
post #125

All AI images, a robot with no arms. Please improve on both. I will happily train one to pick things up and away with and after kids.

Just use the beak?

Re: Microduck

#127
post #22

It's either this or https://mondorobotics.com/ and I'm torn. Obviously it's for my daughter and I will just be safety checking, definitely, 100%.

That's a completely different class of robot. The Beni robot is just a toy, it's just connect the app and drive it around, record videos and do some fancy tricks like flips. It is not meant to be a platform you program yourself. The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc. It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? T…

I would describe the Microduck as more of a toy than Beni. Autonomous cameraman is a real application that Beni performs out of the box. I think you'll struggle to get Microduck to do anything genuinely useful.

Re: Microduck

#128
post #75

Tried out the simulator and was surprised to find that the movement keys are ZQSD; then realized that's the equivalent of WASD on an AZERTY keyboard. Checked and sure enough, Pollen Robotics is a French company. They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.

Or just add the key commands as a hint to the simulation page. Was so keen to try it didnt really register the commands and assumed WASD.

Re: Microduck

#129
post #89

I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.

Interesting how all of the replies so far to your comment assume we’d just release the existing animals into the wild instead of just not breeding more.

I always assumed the "enslaved animal-free" future would be something that came on gradually, likely motivated by economics (i.e. lab-grown meat becoming cheaper and higher quality than farmed, robotic pets being cheaper and more "trouble-free", etc).

I never felt like anybody seriously thought we'd release domestic animals into the wild to fend for themselves-- that's ludicrous.

Re: Microduck

#130
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot. It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes,…

Huh, that's pretty cool! How much of that behavior did you need to roll yourself vs what was already there?

There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
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