Microduck

01 / What it was

Pollen Robotics designs and publishes the Microduck, a small open-source robot duck, with its CAD model, servo model and trained walking policies. We put that design, not a mob or an animation, into the world.

A Python process simulates the duck in MuJoCo in real time, and a client mod draws it in Minecraft. It was reported built on the 27 October stream, walked on command early on 28 October, and was released as Omo Microduck v1.0.0 that day.

02 / How it worked

• MuJoCo at 200 Hz physics and 50 Hz policy, on one CPU core, with Pollen's servo model and gear backlash.
• Pollen's policies: one walks, turns, follows and gets up; another sits and stands. Twelve community policies (roll, cartwheel, hop, dance and others) were graded in the sim first.
• Every 2 seconds the mod sends the nearby blocks' collision boxes to the sim, so walls stop it and ledges drop it.
• The simulation serves poses on 127.0.0.1 only, and the mod polls them at about 25 Hz.
• About 7% of one core for one duck.

03 / What we saw

A real robot design reads differently from a mob. It cannot climb Minecraft stairs, and it falls because its policy loses balance, not because an animation played. Its stair falls became a public reel.

04 / Where it led

One duck became a flock, and the same pattern carried the RP1 humanoid and the ceiling AI.

Sources

1. Omo Microduck README. github.com/omoresearch/omo-microduck the actual open-source Pollen Robotics Microduck, its real CAD, its real servos and its real RL brain, simulated live in MuJoCo and walking on your blocks.
2. Omo Microduck CHANGELOG, v1.0.0. github.com/omoresearch/omo-microduck/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md Terrain: real blocks become MuJoCo collision boxes, live-updated as you build.
3. Stream analysis. stream transcript analysis, 28 Oct 2026 I just asked Opus55 bring RoboDuck into Minecraft.