Even tiny robots need a nap, or at least that is what Jensen Huang told them on stage at NVIDIA's GTC Berlin keynote on Wednesday. Huang brought out four Microducks, 25-centimeter-tall walking robots from French company Pollen Robotics, and told them to walk, sit, stand and then take a nap. Three of the four promptly toppled over, and Huang laughed and coaxed them back upright before asking for a somersault. He told the little bots that they were "created on RTX Spark," explaining that they were trained in the cloud on NVIDIA supercomputers and learned their skills in an Omniverse digital twin. The clip has since spread widely online.

The Microduck is a $399 robot from Pollen Robotics, which is part of Hugging Face. It stands 25 centimeters tall, weighs under 800 grams, and has 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and an articulated beak that can pick up objects. Its behaviors, such as standing, walking and grabbing objects, are trained with reinforcement learning in simulation and then deployed on the real robot. Pollen says the software stack is open source, but it has told the press not to call the robot open-source hardware, since the hardware design files have not been released. The company has reported more than 10,000 sales in the first week, with deliveries planned before Christmas. For NVIDIA, the demo was a lighthearted way to push affordable physical AI, though the big question is how well robots trained in simulation will handle the real world once the stage lights go off.