Overview
- Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics unit opened preorders for Microduck on Thursday, Aug. 27, at an introductory $399 price and expects first shipments before Christmas 2026 in North America, the UK and Europe.
- Microduck is a 25 cm, ~800 g duck‑like biped with about 15 motors, a front camera, a small LiDAR, two IMUs, an RK3566 processor, a removable battery of roughly one hour runtime, and an articulated beak that acts as a simple gripper.
- The company published the full software stack on GitHub under Apache‑2.0, including an SDK, a MuJoCo/Warp‑style simulator and a reinforcement‑learning training repo that supports sim‑to‑real workflows and retraining of shipped policies.
- Out of the box the robot includes seven pre‑trained behaviors (walk, sit/stand, kick, grab, roller‑skate, recover from falls and others), a game controller, and optional accessory packs and spare‑parts bundles for developers.
- The launch builds on Hugging Face’s 2025 Pollen Robotics acquisition and Reachy Mini product line and signals a push to make physical AI accessible to educators and hobbyists while raising practical tradeoffs such as limited battery life and camera privacy depending on third‑party apps.