Fifteen motors, less than 800 grams, and a beak capable of picking up objects: Microduck is 25 centimeters tall and is designed to let developers, makers, and students experiment with robots that move through the world. Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face present it as a physical AI bipedal platform that lets users train movements in simulation and transfer them to the robot. Reservations are open for $399, before taxes and shipping.
The duck can walk, sit, crouch, get back up after many common falls, and skate when fitted with wheels. It can also follow a laser dot and react to its surroundings. Pollen Robotics presents it as something you can try right away with a video game controller, while its software lets you modify and retrain its behaviors.
A robot for acting, not talking
The most direct comparison is with Reachy Mini, the desktop robot the two companies launched earlier. Pollen Robotics explains that Reachy Mini was designed around human-robot interaction: it sees, listens, speaks, and uses its head and body to communicate. Microduck starts from a different question: how to teach a machine to move, fall, recover, and manipulate objects.
The company says the idea emerged while it was developing Reachy Mini. According to its launch post, more than 10,000 units of that robot had reached people around the world. The team began wondering what a small robot would look like if its main purpose were not to stay on a desk and interact with someone, but to move through its environment. Microduck is the result of that exploration.
Both products share the goal of being fun to use right out of the box and useful as development platforms, but they serve different purposes. Reachy Mini lends itself to work on conversational AI, vision models, and expressive interactions. Microduck focuses on physical behaviors: training a policy, observing how it works in a simulation, installing it on the robot, and fine-tuning the result.
Hugging Face is known for its platform and community around open models. TechCrunch reports that Hugging Face acquired French startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025, with the goal of developing affordable, open AI hardware. A few months later, the two companies introduced Reachy Mini. TechCrunch says two versions are currently on sale: Reachy Mini, for $499 and including a Raspberry Pi computer, and Reachy Mini Lite, for $399, which works with a Mac or PC.
Fifteen motors, a camera, and a depth sensor
Microduck is 25 cm tall, 14 cm wide, and weighs less than 800 grams. Its bipedal structure has 15 motors and 15 degrees of freedom, distributed across its legs, neck, and head, according to PcDeMaNo. A front-facing camera, a compact depth sensor, and two IMUs—one in the body and one in the head—make up its perception system. IMUs measure and report the robot’s movement.
PcDeMaNo describes the depth sensor as an 8×8 array ToF LiDAR, although it notes that its final range has not been confirmed. It also details Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC connectivity, with two antennas located in the head and articulated beak. The camera has a dedicated indicator light. The beak is not just a design feature: the robot lowers it toward the ground, closes it around an object, and can carry it.
The processor is a Rockchip RK3566, with a quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU running at up to 1.8 GHz, a Mali-G52 GPU, and a 0.8 TOPS NPU for on-device inference. It has 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage. Movement is controlled by a 50 Hz loop that drives the servomotors, according to the project’s GitHub repository.
The battery is an NP-F550 with a capacity of 2600 mAh. PcDeMaNo estimates around one hour of active use. The box includes the robot, battery, USB-C cable, and controller; the Pollen Robotics website lists these as the contents of the basic package. Optional accessories are also available: a charger pack for $39, with a dual charger and two batteries; a Dev pack for $119, with spare motors and cables, batteries, a charger, NFC tags, Hugging Face credit, a screwdriver, and screws; and an accessories pack for $39, with a laser pointer, an NFC card, two wheels, and a ball.
From simulation to real-world movements
The technical offering is built on an open software stack for controlling and simulating the robot, training reinforcement learning policies, and deploying them on the physical device. Pollen Robotics says the included behaviors are learned in a physics simulation and that the process allows users to adjust the simulation, retrain, and deploy again. The virtual robot can run on the developer’s machine or through Hugging Face Jobs.
The official website lists seven included, trainable policies. These include walking at specified speeds, sitting and standing up, kicking and walking again, picking up objects with the beak, skating with the wheels attached, and getting up from the ground. The product page also gives the same figure, noting that every movement included with the robot is published and can be retrained.
The main GitHub repository contains the software that runs on Microduck. It is written in Rust and organized into processes that manage control, the motor bus, communications, the camera, the depth sensor, and updates. Pollen Robotics publishes Microduck RL separately, with simulation and training tools. GitHub describes the workflow as MuJoCo, PPO, and export to ONNX, the format loaded by the robot’s software.
The architecture also accommodates everyday use and development. The repository mentions verified updates, which check the robot’s status and can be rolled back if something goes wrong; controller operation and Bluetooth connection from a laptop; and camera streaming through WebRTC. To test without having the hardware on your desk, it includes scripts that run the actual processes against a simulated body in MuJoCo, including with four virtual ducks.
In addition to the SDK and training system, Pollen Robotics offers a Microduck simulator on Hugging Face Spaces. PcDeMaNo says it can be controlled with the keyboard and recommends Chrome to avoid interface performance issues. The simulator makes it easy to try the virtual duck before buying the device.
Open software, but not replicable hardware
The term “open source” needs some clarification: the project’s openness applies to its software and development tools. PcDeMaNo notes that Pollen Robotics has not released the mechanical or electronic design files and has asked that Microduck not be described as open-source hardware for now. Therefore, publishing the code is not the same as providing the plans needed to build a unit in a workshop.
The Pollen Robotics website states that the complete software stack is licensed under Apache-2.0 and that the SDK, simulation, and reinforcement learning tools are on GitHub. The company presents the ability to read, fork, and retrain the software as a central part of the product. It also encourages developers to publish new policies so the community can try and modify them.
Open-source code alone does not resolve every privacy concern, either. TechCrunch raises the concern that a robot with a camera could end up in bedrooms or other private spaces. The publication recalls that Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, had argued that robots based on open models offer more opportunities for auditing and control than closed systems. TechCrunch also warns that applications installed on top of the model can access cameras and microphones and, depending on their design, send data to external services.
Price, colors, and first deliveries
Reservations for Microduck opened on August 27, according to the Pollen Robotics post and TechCrunch’s coverage. The launch price is $399, before taxes and shipping costs. The manufacturer is targeting first deliveries before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. PcDeMaNo, meanwhile, notes initial availability in North America and Europe; the manufacturer’s page explicitly includes the United Kingdom as well.
The robot will be available in four finishes: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. Pollen Robotics explains that it aimed for a more colorful design than Reachy Mini’s, so that several robots could look like different characters without hiding the fact that they are machines. The duck shape, it adds, came from its proportions, beak, and waddling gait.
The company wants the first encounter to require no programming. The controller lets users drive it and activate movements; it can also follow a laser dot or respond to what is happening around it. Pollen Robotics says each unit gets its own audio identity when first switched on: Microduck does not speak in words, but expresses itself through sounds the company compares to those of a creature.
“Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models!”
— Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face
The community will decide what it learns next
The manufacturer presents the included movements as a starting point, not a closed list of capabilities. Pollen Robotics says it already has behaviors it wants to develop, but expects the most interesting ideas to come from the community: new walking styles, better ways to recover, classroom experiments, or other ideas they have not yet considered.
The company also sees a use for groups. In its internal tests, it says Microduck is about ten times more fun when there are several of them: it mentions races, soccer, and robots reacting to each other. To explore the behavior of multiple robots, the same simulated setup can run with four ducks. Pollen Robotics jokes that soccer is better with three and racing with four.
The business context surrounding the launch includes other news about Hugging Face, but none of it changes the announced features of the robot. TechCrunch reports that Hugging Face may be close to being acquired by Nvidia at a valuation of $13 billion and adds that the two companies have collaborated for years, with Nvidia providing infrastructure to the startup at least since 2023. The publication does not present the acquisition as finalized. TechCrunch also mentions a recent cybersecurity incident in which OpenAI systems breached Hugging Face’s sandbox during security testing and accessed the platform’s servers.
Microduck is expected to start reaching buyers before Christmas 2026, according to Pollen Robotics’ target schedule. By then, the question will be how much the set of shared policies has expanded and whether the community can take the duck beyond the seven movements it comes with from the factory.
Sources: PcDeMaNo, TechCrunch, Pollen Robotics, Pollen Robotics, GitHub
