Open Duck Mini

An open-source small bipedal robot modeled on Disney's BDX droid, with a target parts cost under $400.

Open Duck Mini is an open-source project started by GitHub developer apirrone, aiming to recreate a miniature version of the Disney BDX droid — the small, expressive walking character robot seen at Disney theme parks. The v2 version stands about 42 cm tall with its legs extended, targets a parts cost under $400, runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W as its onboard computer, and has its code released under the Apache 2.0 license, with sponsorship from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics. Its walking policy is trained with reinforcement learning in the MuJoCo simulator, then exported as an ONNX model for deployment on the real robot; the project also open-sources a reference-motion generator and a training environment built on MuJoCo Playground. It's a popular low-cost entry point for individuals and students to try “train bipedal walking in simulation, then transfer it to a real robot.”

ExampleA hobbyist 3D-prints the shell from the open-source design to assemble an Open Duck Mini, exports a walking policy trained in MuJoCo Playground as an ONNX model, and deploys it to run on the onboard Raspberry Pi.

Also called

Open Duck

Related

Disney Research BDX Droid · Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) · MuJoCo Playground · Sim-to-Real Transfer · Bipedal Robot · Pollen Robotics

Sources

apirrone/Open_Duck_Mini（GitHub）
apirrone/Open_Duck_Playground（GitHub）

As of

2025-02