Commercial robotics reveals used to mean a long wait: a company shows off a slick prototype, and hobbyists watch from the sidelines until it ships. Pollen Robotics did exactly that with Microduck last month, a duck-shaped robot with 15 servo joints and enough onboard compute to walk, sit, and pick up small objects. Luwu Dynamics wasn't willing to wait for a retail release, so it built XGO Duck, an open-source robot you can assemble today from parts you can actually buy.
What Luwu Dynamics Built
XGO Duck keeps Microduck's duck-shaped body, its 15-servo joint layout, and the same joint order, but swaps in different electronics end to end. The brain is an Arduino UNO Q, a board that pairs a Qualcomm processor running Linux with an STM32 microcontroller on a single unit. Fifteen FeeTech 1910 servos handle the legs, feet, neck, and head, wired into a custom expansion board that sits directly on top of the UNO Q. That board manages power distribution and the servo bus, adds a QMI8658A six-axis IMU for balance and motion sensing, and includes 5V and 3.3V regulation, serial buffers, a DC jack, and a battery connector. Most of the body, including the legs, head, and neck, comes off a 3D printer, with the feet soles and mouth printed in flexible TPU; a stack of M2 screws and standard bearings hold the frame together.
Why the UNO Q Matters Here
The interesting engineering decision isn't the duck shape, it's how XGO Duck splits compute. Linux on the Qualcomm side runs the walking, get-up, and pick policies Luwu Dynamics published in its runtime repository, while the STM32 side handles real-time jobs like reading the IMU and driving servo signal pins without dropping a beat. That's the same split you'd reach for on a bigger build, where a Raspberry Pi handles vision and planning while a microcontroller handles motors, except here it ships on one board, so there's no separate serial link to solder between two chips.
- 15 FeeTech 1910 servos for legs, feet, neck, and head
- Arduino UNO Q: Qualcomm Linux processor plus STM32 microcontroller
- QMI8658A six-axis IMU on a custom expansion PCB
- 5V and 3.3V regulation, serial buffers, DC jack, battery connector
Build It Yourself
The GitHub repository ships the full expansion board schematic, PCB layout, bill of materials, pick-and-place data, and an assembly guide, plus STL files for every printed part. If your robotics club or thesis project needs a hardware platform that goes beyond a wheeled chassis, this is a legged robot with a real IMU and a documented PCB you can source and assemble instead of designing from zero. Start with the Arduino UNO Q datasheet, check your servo bus wiring against the schematic before powering anything, and budget time for tuning the walking policy to your own printed tolerances.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
