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%.
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? Then probably the Microduck is the way. If it's literally just a toy, then the Beni robot is better because that's literally all it is.
I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.
With Unitree bots all but banned in the US I've been looking to pivot away from that platform anyway. Took a couple months to jailbreak the Go2 platform initially, but I'm betting this will go even faster with modern agents
UPDATE: That's their kickstarter customer service. Their subreddit has founders liberally promising API/devkit access, targeted at Q1 '27
it seems like the only useful capability this thing has is picking up very small items of clothing with I imagine a very low success rate.
Many, many startups and several megacorps have burned their money. Robots are so fun to make, if you have that spirit in you! But alas they are very, very hard to make valuable outside of manufacturing /warehousing/weapons.
Bonus points for laser tag capability like those tabletop tanks.
Well they have had a lot of time to get their shit together, and its not even happened a little tiny bit.
But maybe one day they will die? And when the Mormon church inherits the IP they might use it a bit better.
Yeah, they struggle...
Though... the Unity-engine based Shadowrun(s)/Battletech were decent. Mechwarrior 5:Mercs (not Clans) with it's doing-the-heavy-lifting mods is fun.
But that seems more like them half listening to others-with-a-clue than themselves getting their act together. It is frustrating knowing the wealth of stories they have, and yet they offer precious little.
The Battletech devs sold out to Paradox, and then demergered, and when they came out again they no longer own the rights to their own Battletech game. So even if they wanted to do another one it would have to be completely different.
Mechwarrior 5 is slowly finding the right place to be, but they fired their lead artist so I dont have a lot of hope anymore.
Microduck looks amazing, but the "Ships before Christmas 2026" is begging to be blown past. That's why I'm not pre-ordering. If it's around in the spring, let's go, but considering that HuggingFace just got acquired by Nvidia, I'm not sure where this all will go.
I have been wrong (I love my Remarkable 2), but it still holds as a principle ;)
I've only contributed to three kickstarters, and they all worked out well. But I think I'm more selective than most people, and generally don't jump on something until it's already been fully funded by other people.
> Right now, we simply haven't reached any conclusions regarding developer tools, documentation, or access. We haven't done the planning or the groundwork yet. Our current plan is to look into all of this after we've shipped the first batch and things settle down a bit.
(Except iDevices of course)