Overview
- Pollen Robotics, owned by Hugging Face, opened preorders on Thursday, August 27, 2026 for the Microduck at an introductory price of $399 and says first shipments will arrive before Christmas 2026.
- The toy-sized robot is about 25 cm tall, weighs roughly 800 grams, runs on a Rockchip RK3566 with about 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB storage, and includes a front camera, an 8×8 LiDAR time-of-flight sensor, two IMUs, microphones, a speaker, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and a removable battery that lasts roughly one hour.
- Hugging Face published an open-source SDK, a physics simulator and a full reinforcement-learning training stack on GitHub so developers can train policies in simulation then transfer them to the physical Microduck; the software is permissively licensed but the robot’s mechanical and electronic design files are restricted to a non-commercial license.
- Microduck ships with seven pre-trained behaviors such as walking, sitting, grabbing with its beak, roller-skating and self-righting, includes a game controller for non-coders, and offers optional paid accessories like a $39 charger pack and a $119 dev pack sold separately in four launch colors and in North America, Europe and the UK.
- Built after Hugging Face’s 2025 acquisition of Pollen Robotics and following the Reachy Mini, Microduck aims to lower the cost of sim-to-real robotics for classrooms and hobbyists but has practical limits because on-board compute and battery life are modest and training advanced behaviors requires an Nvidia GPU or Hugging Face’s infrastructure and careful handling of camera and sensor privacy by third-party apps.