microduck-roulade

roulade

Forward roll from a standing start, trained in simulation only (mjlab / MuJoCo Warp, 10,000 iterations, 4096 envs, 173 min on one RTX 5090). Not yet tested on a real Microduck.

A episodic policy for the microduck (61-D observation, 14 actions, 50 Hz). Runs 2.0 s and returns itself to a standing pose. Holding the button chains another run.

Run it on a robot

sudo robotctl policy add roulade witcheer/microduck-roulade
robotctl robot do roulade

The observation normalizer is baked into policy.onnx; feed raw observations. manifest.json follows schema 2 of the microduck policy manifest (docs/policy-manifest.md in the daemon repo).

Training

• repo: pollen-robotics/microduck_rl
• branch: develop
• commit: 53b8971b6

Results in simulation

Simulation only. This policy has not run on a real Microduck yet; the roll takes about one second in MuJoCo and nothing here says what the real servos and floor will do.

• Task Mjlab-Roulade-Flat-MicroDuck from pollen-robotics/microduck_rl at 53b8971, the maker's budget of 10,000 iterations, 4096 parallel envs, 173 min (1.04 s/iteration) on one RTX 5090.
• Proof takes with mjlab play (1 env, standing spawn, 12 s episode), read from the body-frame gravity vector and trunk height, not from the video: 3 of 3 takes complete the roll. Upright at 115 mm at 0 s, head on the floor at 0.3 s, upside down at 0.6 s (trunk 147 mm), on its back at 0.8 s (42 mm), upright at 1.0 s, back at 115 mm from 1.2 s and held to the end of the episode. No environment reset inside any take. The iteration-0 control tips forward and lands face down at 0.8 s.
• The mean reward was flat from about iteration 2,000 (35.0) to 10,000 (36.4). A 3,000-iteration run would have given the same policy.
• Not tested: rolls entered from the task's mid-roll spawns. Only rolls from standing were recorded.
• Clip (iteration 0 vs iteration 10,000, half speed): https://x.com/witcheer/status/2102076057411031472

Built as level 6 of a sim-first skill tree for a Microduck that is still on order. Levels 1 to 5 (walk, stand up, sit and stand, rough-ground walk, walk plus recover) came before it; more policies from the same tree will appear under witcheer/microduck-*.