This duck-shaped robot is almost cute enough to make you forget its AI

Eat your heart out Boston Dynamics. This duck-shaped robot is almost cute enough to make you forget its AI. The duck-shaped robot features 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor, and an articulated beak that can pick up objects.

Microduck comes with learned behaviors and can be controlled with a gamepad, but developers can also teach it new skills through reinforcement learning, simulation, and open-source software. AI has earned an overwhelmingly negative perception over the last couple of years. At this point, is there any way for the technology to shed that stigma and become more approachable to the general public.

One of the best attempts at that may be Hugging Face’s new tiny duck-like robot. Hugging Face unveiled a cute bipedal robot known as Microduck.