Hugging Face's $399 Microduck is a tiny open-source robot you can actually train
Hugging Face and its robotics subsidiary Pollen Robotics have opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot that costs $399 before taxes and shipping. It's the most affordable entry point yet for hands-on reinforcement learning (RL) research outside a lab, and it ships to the US, UK, Canada, and much of Europe before Christmas 2026.
Microduck stands 25 cm tall and weighs under 800 grams.
A Motorola in duck clothing
Microduck is shaped like a duck — deliberately so. Its design borrows from waterfowl anatomy to solve a real engineering problem: stable, low-center-of-gravity walking. Under the plastic shell sit 15 motors spread across the legs, head, and neck, letting the robot walk, crouch, squat, recover from falls, and even roll on skates. It weighs under 800 grams and fits on a desk.
The sensor loadout is surprisingly capable for the price. A built-in camera, a small LiDAR unit, and two IMUs (inertial measurement units, which track orientation and movement) give the robot enough spatial awareness to navigate a room. A hinged beak can pick up small objects. Audio is handled by an onboard microphone and speaker — the robot communicates in sounds, not words, and each unit gets a unique audio identity after setup.
The robot's beak can grasp small objects, while onboard LiDAR and a camera handle navigation.
On the compute side, Microduck carries 32 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A 2,600 mAh battery delivers around one hour of continuous runtime.
The open-source pitch
Out of the box, Microduck responds to a gamepad or follows a laser pointer — no coding required. The real draw for developers is what's underneath: a full SDK, MuJoCo simulation support, and RL training tools, all published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, per Pollen Robotics. That means you can train a behavior in simulation and transfer it to the physical robot, a workflow previously reserved for university labs and well-funded startups.
Microduck's open-source stack supports MuJoCo simulation and reinforcement learning training.
Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025. The company is positioning Microduck as a step up from its earlier Reachy Mini desktop robot — more mobility-focused, more hackable. TechCrunch reports Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue is targeting 50,000 units, roughly $20 million in revenue, as the AI platform looks to build a foothold in consumer and research robotics.
Pre-orders are open now at $399 in four colors — Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. Deliveries to the US and UK are targeted before the end of 2026.