Most AI news is about software you cannot touch. Microduck is the opposite: a small, armless, duck-shaped robot that wobbles across a desk, falls over, and gets back up. It is also one of the cheaper ways to experiment with robot learning on real hardware.

Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux-based company owned by AI platform Hugging Face, opened pre-orders for Microduck on August 27, 2026, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The company says units are due to ship by Christmas. As of my latest sources, I did not find reports that deliveries have begun.

What it is

Microduck is a bipedal robot about 25 centimetres (10 inches) tall that weighs under 800 grams. It has 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR sensor and two inertial sensors, plus a beak that works as a gripper. According to The Next Web's reporting, it runs on a Rockchip RK3566 chip with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, a part first reported by The Verge. The box includes the robot, battery, USB-C cable and a game controller. It comes in four colours: Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky.

Out of the box, it can walk, sit, crouch, kick, scoop up small objects and stand back up after most falls. With optional roller skates, it skates. The beak can lift roughly 100 grams.

How it learns

The selling point is not the tricks it ships with but the ones you can add. Pollen says each built-in move was learned through reinforcement learning, a trial-and-error method, inside the MuJoCo physics simulator. The company says a usable walking gait trains in about one to two hours on a GPU, with 4,096 virtual ducks practising at once. Owners can train new movements the same way and load them onto the real robot.

The software is open source. The robot's SDK and software sit in one public GitHub repository, and the reinforcement-learning and simulation-to-real tools in another. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue described it as "a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning," and wrote: "Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models."

Who it is for

This is not a home assistant. It does not talk, and it communicates in chirps. Popular Science noted that for now its practical use cases are pretty limited. One independent review framed it as a testbed for people who want to teach a robot to move, not a helper that does tasks. That fits the target audience: students, hobbyists, developers and researchers who want a low-cost way into physical AI. The Register described it as a cheap testbed for learning about hardware AI, machine learning and modern robotics.

Why the price matters

Research-grade legged robots usually cost far more. At $399, Microduck lowers the barrier for classrooms and small labs, and open-source code means buyers can inspect and modify what the robot runs. It is Hugging Face's second move into robotics, following an earlier desktop robot from the same group.

What to check before buying

  • Use the official page. Pollen Robotics sells Microduck at pollen-robotics.com/microduck. Several look-alike sites also use the name, and some show different prices or claim a sold-out first batch. I could not verify those claims, so treat them with caution.
  • $399 is an introductory pre-order price. It excludes taxes and shipping, and the price after the introductory period has not been announced in the sources I reviewed.
  • Delivery is a plan, not a fact yet. "By Christmas" is the company's stated target.

What happens next

The test will be first deliveries. If the robot arrives on time and the open-source tools work as described, it could become a popular classroom and hobby platform. If not, it will join a long list of promising robot gadgets that struggled to ship. For now it is an interesting, inexpensive way to try training a physical robot, with its limits clearly stated.

Category: Technology / Robotics / Consumer Tech

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