Video Friday: Introducing Microduck

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN

Enjoy today’s videos!

NVIDIA just paid US$12.9 billion dollars for the company that acquired Pollen Robotics, and this must be why.

Meet Microduck. 🦆 The 25 cm, 780 g robot that waddles, falls, gets back up, and learns new tricks.

Packed inside: 15 degrees of freedom, a front camera, an 8×8 LiDAR, two IMUs, mics, a speaker, NFC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Out of the box, Microduck already walks, sits, crouches, roller skates, picks up objects with its articulated beak, and recovers from falls on its own. Drive it with a game controller, plug in accessories and NFC tagged objects, run autonomous behaviors, or gather several Microducks for races and football.

Software fully open source. Ready for whatever you throw at it.

On pre-order for an astonishingly low $399, and ships before Christmas.

[ Microduck ]

Thanks, Matthieu!

If you’ve chosen to ignore all of the earlier DARPA Lift Challenge videos that we’ve posted, now you can get all caught up in about five minutes.

[ DARPA ]

You had me at “54-gram robot that out jumps a kangaroo.”

[ IEEE Transactions on Robotics ]

Sometimes, you just need a video like this.

Most fish-inspired robots are built for one size and one job, so scaling them up or down usually means starting from scratch. A team of engineers says it’s found a way to solve that problem. They’ve unveiled ScaFi, a robot modeled on fish like cod and mackerel.

[ New York University ]

Thanks, Leah!

Martin writes, “We’re a small robotics team in Czechia, Europe building practical hardware around the Unitree G1. Here’s a short demo of our lightweight gripper picking up a strawberry; the gripper weighs under 200 g and is designed for simple, sensitive manipulation without adding a complex multi-finger hand.

[ Sentio Robotix ]

Thanks, Martin!

Hybrid visual markers that are useful for both cameras and lidar is a neat idea.

[ Hello Robot ]

Thanks, Binit!

EmoLo brings emotion-inspired expressive locomotion to Open Duck Mini V2, a low-cost open-source bipedal robot inspired by Disney’s BDX droids. With a single reinforcement learning policy, the robot can generate distinct walking styles associated with different emotional expressions, showing how characterful and expressive whole-body motion can be achieved on an accessible robotic platform.

[ EmoLo ]

Thanks, Masato!

If it’s possible for a robot with a completely immobile face to look frustrated, this robot absolutely does starting at three minutes into this video.

[ DLR RM ]

Noble Machines deployed its first general-purpose robots to a Fortune Global 500 industrial customer within 18 months of the company’s launch and met its first delivery milestone, made possible by its AI-driven whole-body control and industry-leading end-to-end autonomy.

[ Noble Machines ]

We’ve reduced the time it takes to go from physical prompt → robot behavior. The faster anyone can teach a robot to do something new, the easier it becomes to scale physical work.

[ Generalist ]

I know this video is mostly a gimmick, but I would totally rent a moderately heavy lift quadruped for a couple of days to help with a move.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Is taking two minutes to excellently fold a shirt too long, or do we even care how long it takes, as long as it’s a robot doing it?

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

TRON 2 × Wuji Hand 2 handles TCM pharmacy work: picking, weighing, grinding and packaging. The omnidirectional base frees the hands, while precise gripping and dual-arm force control enable mid-air operations.