MICRODUCK GAME: Red Light, Green Light

MICRODUCK GAME: the duck plays the doll of Red Light, Green Light. It turns its back, chants and quacks one syllable at a time, whips round to catch anyone still moving, then bows to the jury and wheees. Pollen's own walker, unmodified, performs an original 20 s timeline.

An entry for MicroDuck Got a Talent on the Microduck Arena. Simulation only β€” see below.

The act

The duck plays the doll of the playground game Red Light, Green Light (in Korea, mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida, "the rose of Sharon has bloomed"):

time what happens
0.0–1.9 s the doll surveys the players, tilts its head and quacks hello
1.9–3.4 s it turns its back on them (a half turn in place)
3.8–6.7 s it chants mu-gung-hwa kko-chi pi-eot-seum-ni-da, one quack β€” and one open beak β€” per syllable, head swaying by phrase
6.6–8.6 s the head snaps over its shoulder and the body whips round to face the field
8.7–10.1 s red light: the body freezes while the head scans for anyone moving
10.15–11.2 s caught one: the head locks on, two quacks
11.2–12.8 s back turned again
13.1–14.9 s the chant again, faster, to trick the players
14.8–17.9 s snap, whip round, scan the other way, quack at the audience
18.2–19.1 s a bow to the jury
19.1–20.0 s wheee, head wiggling

What runs

  • policy.onnx is Pollen Robotics' own walking gait, alpha_walking.onnx from pollen-robotics/microduck-policies at revision 665ae4eb, copied unmodified (sha256 e36332d383997d51401897734cd3e79cf5038406feddb18b4d57ecfb141daa6c). It is the same network the Arena ships as its walker.
  • timeline.json is the performance, original to this entry: 473 keyframes over 20 s, sampled at the 50 Hz control rate, 24 quacks (RT) and a wheee (LT) from 19.14 s. It drives the walker's own command: twist = (vx, vy, wz), used only for turns in place (|wz| ≀ 3 rad/s, vx = vy = 0), and head = (neck pitch, head pitch, head yaw, head roll) within [-1, -0.9, -1.4, -0.3] … [0, 0.25, 0.9, 0.3] rad. The body command is never used.
  • The act only turns in place and moves the head: in trials on the Arena's stage, a fast walk (1.2 m/s) and the body group toppled this walker, so the performance leaves both out. Each half-turn's length was tuned on perturbed seeds so the doll lands facing where it means to.

Checked locally

On the Arena's own runner (runner version 4, MuJoCo 3.10.0), event got-a-talent (20 s, seed 1):

check result detail
the official run (seed 1), arena score, local 20.00 s of 20 s played (finish) run 01M4RSNWAHMTGE47Y030Z4
seeds 1-40 with the event's own perturbation 40/40 without a fall after each half-turn and at the end, the doll faces within 17Β° of where it should (mean 6.4Β° over 5 moments Γ— 40 seeds)

The Arena plays this on its own machine; the numbers above are local runs of its published code, not its verdict.

Simulation only

Made for the Arena's simulator. policy.onnx is a Pollen walking gait that robotctl can load into the walk slot, but the daemon does not play timeline.json: the act is a stage performance for the Arena, and nothing here was run on a physical robot.

Credits and licence

  • The performer, policy.onnx, is Β© Pollen Robotics, released under the Apache License 2.0 in pollen-robotics/microduck-policies; it is redistributed here unmodified, with the licence in LICENSE.
  • The timeline, manifest and this card are original work by @jrubiosainz, also released under the Apache License 2.0.
  • The manifest and this card's header were generated with Pollen's own publish code from microduck_rl, used unchanged.
  • Red Light, Green Light is a traditional children's game. This is an independent community entry, not affiliated with Pollen Robotics or with any television production.
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