Pollen Robotics, a company acquired by Hugging Face in 2025, introduced the Microduck on August 27, 2026. This bipedal robot stands 25 centimeters tall and weighs under 800 grams. It is available for preorder at an introductory price of $399, excluding taxes and shipping, and comes in four color options: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. The company targets initial deliveries before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe, and the UK. However, strong demand led to over $2.6 million in orders within 24 hours, pushing new order delivery estimates to four to six months.
The Microduck features 15 motors for whole-body movement, a front camera, a compact 8x8 Time-of-Flight (ToF) LiDAR sensor, and two Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). It also includes an articulated beak that functions as a gripper, microphones, a speaker, and two NFC antennas. The robot is powered by a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage, with connectivity through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A removable 2600 mAh NP-F550 battery provides approximately one hour of operation.
Unlike Pollen Robotics' previous product, the Reachy Mini, which focused on human-robot interaction, the Microduck emphasizes physical action and mobility. The Microduck can walk, sit, crouch, recover from falls, and roller-skate with an optional accessory pack. It ships with seven pre-trained behaviors and an included gamepad controller, allowing users to operate it immediately. These pre-learned behaviors enable the robot to react to its surroundings and follow a laser pointer without requiring initial coding.
The core purpose of the Microduck is to serve as an open-source development platform for physical AI and reinforcement learning. Its open-source software stack encompasses robot control, simulation, reinforcement learning tools, and sim-to-real deployment capabilities. Developers can train new behaviors in a physics simulator, either locally or using Hugging Face Jobs, and then transfer these learned policies to the physical robot. The training environments, reward functions, and sim-to-real recipes are publicly available on GitHub. This approach aims to make the process of teaching robots new physical behaviors more accessible and less prone to the risks and costs associated with real-world experimentation.
The design of the Microduck, with its duck-like proportions, articulated beak, and waddling gait, was chosen to make the robot approachable while still revealing its underlying mechanics. Each Microduck generates a unique audio identity upon its first activation, communicating through creature-like sounds rather than spoken words. The robot's compact size is intended to facilitate experimentation, as it can withstand tumbles without significant damage or safety concerns.
The launch of the Microduck follows Hugging Face's broader initiative to integrate open-source AI into physical hardware. In 2024, the company introduced LeRobot, a collection of AI models and tools for robotics. The Microduck is positioned as a tool for developers to explore how AI can control physical movement and interact with the real world, building upon the company's philosophy of sharing models and development tools.