Microduck: Hugging Face's Complete $399 Smart Robot Guide

Microduck is a 25 cm bipedal robot duck that Hugging Face and its subsidiary Pollen Robotics put on pre-order on 27 August 2026 for $399, and it is the first piece of consumer hardware either company has shipped that is built around walking rather than talking. It has 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR sensor, two inertial measurement units and a beak that opens and closes as a gripper. It waddles, it kicks a ball, it picks a sock off the floor, it puts on roller skates, and when it falls over it gets back up on its own.

The pitch underneath the cuteness is narrower and more interesting than the launch videos suggest. Pollen Robotics is not selling a toy or a smart speaker with legs. It is selling an assembled, mass-produced test rig for reinforcement learning — a machine whose seven shipped behaviours were all trained in simulation and transferred to real hardware, whose training code is published, and whose policies you are explicitly invited to retrain and replace. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue described it as an “open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning”, and that sentence is the product.

This breakdown covers what the pre-order actually includes, the full published specification, the seven behaviours that ship on the device, where the open-source claim holds and where it stops, the do-it-yourself project this hardware grew out of, how it compares with the Reachy Mini line Hugging Face already sells, and the three ceilings — battery, payload and compute — that decide whether it belongs on your desk or on a shelf. Pollen Robotics’ own introduction post is the primary source for most of the numbers below, and every figure here is traceable to a document in the References section rather than to a press summary.

Table of contents

What the Microduck Pre-Order Actually Includes
Microduck Hardware: 15 Motors, LiDAR and a Grasping Beak
The Seven Behaviours Microduck Ships With
Microduck’s Open Source Is Real Software and Closed Hardware
From Open Duck Mini to Microduck: the BDX Lineage
Microduck vs Reachy Mini: Two Different Hugging Face Bets
What the $399 Microduck Price Actually Buys
Who Should Actually Pre-Order a Microduck
Frequently Asked Questions About Microduck
References

What the Microduck Pre-Order Actually Includes

Pre-orders opened on 27 August 2026 at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping, listed on the Pollen Robotics store at €340 for European buyers. That price buys an assembled robot, not a kit.

What comes in the box

The base Microduck package ships with the robot itself, one removable battery, a USB-C cable and a game controller. The gamepad matters more than it sounds: one of the shipped behaviours is gamepad-driven walking, so the robot is drivable the moment it is charged, with no code written and no environment configured. Four colourways are offered — Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky — at the same price.

The three optional packs

Three add-on packs sit alongside the robot at checkout, and they are priced so that the fully loaded configuration lands just under $600. The Accessory Pack at $39 is the one that unlocks the launch-video party tricks: it carries the roller skates, a laser pointer, a ball and NFC materials. The Charger Pack, also $39, is two spare batteries. The Dev Pack at $119 is aimed at people who expect to break something — it bundles batteries and NFC tags with spare motor parts and Hugging Face platform credit for cloud training runs.

Where and when it ships

First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026. The launch shipping list covers the United States, Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and South Korea, with Pollen Robotics saying further countries follow later. A Christmas target on a first production run of a bipedal robot is a target, not a commitment, and pre-order buyers should read it that way.

Item	Price (USD)	Price (EUR)	What it contains
Microduck robot	$399	€340	Robot, battery, USB-C cable, gamepad
Accessory Pack	$39	€33	Roller skates, laser pointer, ball, NFC materials
Charger Pack	$39	€33	Two additional batteries
Dev Pack	$119	€99.99	Batteries, NFC tags, spare motor parts, platform credit
Everything above	$596	€505.99	Fully loaded configuration

Microduck Hardware: 15 Motors, LiDAR and a Grasping Beak

The published specification is unusually complete for a pre-order, which is itself a signal — the hardware is finished enough to describe precisely.

The body

Microduck stands 25 cm tall and weighs 780 g on the store listing, which press coverage rounds to “under 800 g”. Fifteen motors drive whole-body movement across the legs, the torso, the head and the beak. There is no arm anywhere on the machine. Manipulation is done entirely with the articulated beak, which opens and closes as a single-degree-of-freedom gripper — a design decision that removes two limbs, a great deal of cost, and most of the failure modes that make small manipulators frustrating.

What it senses

The sensor stack is a wide-angle front camera, an 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR array, two inertial measurement units, microphones and a speaker. Two IMUs rather than one is the detail worth noticing: a second unit at a different point on the body gives the balance controller a far better estimate of how the torso is rotating relative to the feet, which is what makes the self-righting behaviour tractable on a machine this light. The 8×8 time-of-flight array is not a scanning LiDAR and will not build a room map on its own; it is a coarse depth grid for obstacle proximity.

What runs the policies

Compute is a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, paired with 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and two NFC antennas — one in the head, one in the beak — handle connectivity. Power comes from a removable NP-F550 battery, a standard camera-industry cell, rated at roughly one hour of runtime. The onboard control loop runs the neural policy at 50 Hz, which is the number that tells you this is a real closed-loop controller and not a scripted animation player.

Specification	Published value
Height	25 cm
Weight	780 g
Actuators	15 motors, whole body
Gripper	Articulated beak, roughly 100 g lift
Vision	Wide-angle front camera
Depth	8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR
Proprioception	Two IMUs
Audio	Microphones and speaker
Compute	Rockchip RK3566 plus AI accelerator
Memory and storage	1 GB RAM, 32 GB storage
Wireless	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two NFC antennas
Battery	Removable NP-F550, about 1 hour
Control loop	50 Hz onboard policy loop
Software licence	Apache 2.0

The Seven Behaviours Microduck Ships With

Seven trained policies are loaded on the device at delivery. Every one of them was produced by the same pipeline the buyer gets access to, which is the point of shipping them at all.

Walking and rolling

The first two are locomotion. Walking is the default gait, drivable from the bundled gamepad. Rolling is a separate policy that takes over when the roller-skate wheels from the Accessory Pack are fitted — the machine is not walking with wheels on its feet, it is running a different controller trained for a different contact model. Training two locomotion policies for two foot configurations is the clearest possible demonstration of what the platform is for.

Grasping and kicking

Grasping drives the beak onto an object and closes it. Pollen Robotics’ demonstration footage shows Microduck picking up socks and marker pens and dropping them into a box, which is a fair reflection of the roughly 100 g the beak can lift. Kicking aims a foot at a ball. Neither is a manipulation breakthrough; both are hard enough on a 780 g biped that doing them without falling over is the achievement.

Standing up and sitting

Getting back up after a fall is the behaviour that changes how the robot feels to own. A small biped that needs a human to right it becomes a shelf ornament within a week. Microduck recovers from the common fall poses by itself, so a session can continue unattended. Sitting is the complementary policy, and it doubles as the safe resting state.

Audio identity

The seventh output is sound. Microduck does not speak; it vocalises. Each unit is given a generated audio identity, so two robots on the same desk do not sound the same. Contrast that with Reachy Mini, which is built around conversational interaction — the split between the two products is deliberate, and Pollen Robotics frames it as starting “from the other side of physical AI: action”.

Microduck's Open Source Is Real Software and Closed Hardware

The open-source claim on this launch is stronger than most and narrower than the headlines imply. Both halves deserve stating plainly.

What Apache 2.0 actually covers

The Microduck control software is published under Apache 2.0. The repository is the robot’s operating brain, written in Rust: a motor-control daemon, an update-and-rollback service, Wi-Fi and identity configuration, Bluetooth, gamepad input, camera streaming over WebRTC and the time-of-flight sensor interface, all communicating over JSON-RPC on Unix sockets. A companion repository, microduck_rl, holds the training pipeline — policies trained in MuJoCo with proximal policy optimisation and domain randomisation, exported to ONNX and loaded by the runtime. A simulator runs on Hugging Face Spaces, and training jobs can run on Hugging Face Jobs rather than local hardware.

Crucially, all seven shipped policies are published and retrainable. That is a genuinely uncommon position. Most consumer robots ship behaviours as sealed binaries; here the artefact and the recipe that produced it are both in the open, which means a buyer can inspect why the gait looks the way it does and change it.

What it does not cover

The hardware is not open. Pollen Robotics’ Santiago Pavon told The Register the company “has no plans to open source the hardware” — no released CAD, no bill of materials, no published motor specification you could second-source. So Microduck is an open-source software stack on proprietary hardware, and if the company stops making replacement motors, the Dev Pack’s spare parts are the extent of your supply chain.

Why the distinction matters

For a university lab, this split is close to ideal: the research surface is the policy, and that is fully open. For a hardware hacker expecting the do-it-yourself heritage to continue into the product, it is a real limitation. Read the licence as covering everything you would want to modify and nothing you would want to manufacture.

From Open Duck Mini to Microduck: the BDX Lineage

Microduck did not appear from nothing. It is the productised descendant of an open hardware project with a visible history.

Antoine Pirrone’s Open Duck Mini

Open Duck Mini is a community project started by Antoine Pirrone, an R&D engineer at Pollen Robotics, to build a miniature open-source version of Disney’s BDX droid — the small waddling bipeds from the Star Wars parks. The project scaled that silhouette down to roughly 35 cm, published its STL files, bill of materials and code, and attracted sponsorship from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics. Its policies are trained with proximal policy optimisation in MuJoCo, exactly as Microduck’s are.

What changed on the way to a product

Three things. The robot got smaller, from about 35 cm to 25 cm. The sensing got richer, with the time-of-flight array, the second IMU and the NFC antennas added. And the beak became a gripper rather than a decoration, which is what turns a walking demonstration into a machine that can do a task. What did not change is the training stack, and that continuity is why the shipped behaviours were credible on day one.

Why the price is the interesting part

A self-built Open Duck Mini lands in broadly the same money once printing, motors and electronics are counted — but it lands there after weeks of assembly and calibration, and with no guarantee that your build walks. Microduck removes that variance for the same order of cost. For a classroom buying ten units, the difference between “an assembled robot” and “ten build projects” is the entire decision.

Microduck vs Reachy Mini: Two Different Hugging Face Bets

Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, based in Bordeaux, in April 2025, and shipped the Reachy Mini desktop robots a few months later. Around 10,000 Reachy Mini units had sold by May 2026, so this is a second product line built on a real installed base rather than a first attempt.

Factor	Microduck	Reachy Mini	Reachy Mini Lite
Price	$399	$499	$399
Form	Mobile biped	Static desktop unit	Static desktop unit
Compute	Onboard RK3566	Onboard Raspberry Pi	Tethered to a Mac or PC
Primary modality	Movement and manipulation	Conversation and expression	Conversation and expression
Speech	Non-verbal audio identity	Speaks	Speaks
Core skill taught	Policy training and sim-to-real	Application building	Application building
Untethered operation	Yes, about 1 hour	Yes, mains or battery	No

They teach different skills

A Reachy Mini teaches you to build applications on top of a robot that already works. Microduck teaches you to make a robot work at all. If your interest is wiring a language model to a physical presence, Reachy Mini is the right machine and Microduck is the wrong one. If your interest is why a controller keeps a biped upright on carpet but not on tile, the reverse holds.

The strategic read

Selling a $399 machine whose entire value is training and redeploying policies puts a physical trainer for embodied models in front of a very large developer community. That fits a company whose asset is the developer community itself — and it lands during the same fortnight as reports that Nvidia is in talks to buy Hugging Face at around a $13 billion valuation, which neither company has confirmed. A hardware line with a real installed base does not hurt that conversation.

Published prices across the Hugging Face robot range, scaled to the $499 Reachy Mini

Reachy Mini $499 — 100% of the top price

Microduck robot $399 — 80%

Reachy Mini Lite $399 — 80%

Dev Pack $119 — 24%

Accessory Pack and Charger Pack, each $39 — 8%

Each bar is the published price divided by the $499 Reachy Mini price. No figure here is estimated.

What the $399 Microduck Price Actually Buys

Three published numbers set hard ceilings on what this machine can be asked to do, and none of them is a defect. They are the trade-offs that produced the price.

The battery ceiling

About one hour of runtime on a removable NP-F550 cell. For a training platform this is workable, because a reinforcement learning session is naturally punctuated — you run an episode, you look at what happened, you change something. For anything resembling continuous operation it is not. The $39 Charger Pack exists precisely because the honest answer to “how long does it run” is “swap the battery”.

The payload ceiling

The beak lifts roughly 100 g. That is a sock, a marker pen, a table-tennis ball — about 13% of the robot’s own 780 g mass. Anyone imagining Microduck fetching a phone or a mug should recalibrate now rather than in December.

The compute ceiling

One gigabyte of RAM and an RK3566 will run a compact policy network at 50 Hz all day. They will not run a vision-language-action model locally. Anything heavier than the shipped policies trains off-device — in the simulator, on Hugging Face Jobs, or on your own hardware — and is then exported to ONNX and deployed. This is the standard shape of small-robot ML model development, and it is why the training repository matters more than the onboard silicon.

Share of a fully loaded $596 Microduck order, by line item

Robot itself $399 — 67%

Dev Pack $119 — 20%

Accessory Pack $39 — 6.5%

Charger Pack $39 — 6.5%

Each bar is that line item divided by the $596 total of all four items at their published prices.

Who Should Actually Pre-Order a Microduck

The specification answers this more cleanly than the marketing does.

Educators and university labs

This is the strongest case. A robotics or artificial intelligence and machine learning course that wants students to train a policy in simulation and watch it transfer to hardware has, until now, had to choose between an expensive research platform and a build project that eats the first six weeks of term. Microduck is assembled, the pipeline is published, and a set of ten costs less than one mid-range research arm.

Reinforcement learning researchers

For anyone working on locomotion, sim-to-real transfer or domain randomisation, a cheap physical target with a documented simulation model and a 50 Hz control loop is a useful thing to have on the bench. Not because the results transfer to a humanoid, but because the iteration loop is short and breaking it costs $399 rather than a grant line.

Hobbyists and makers

Buy it for what it is: an assembled robot with an open software stack and closed hardware. If your satisfaction comes from designing the mechanism, Open Duck Mini remains the project. If it comes from teaching a robot something new, Microduck removes every obstacle between you and that.

Businesses

The direct commercial case is thin — this is not a service robot, and a one-hour battery with a 100 g payload rules out the obvious deployments. The indirect case is real: teams building embodied products need somewhere cheap to learn how policy training, simulation and deployment actually behave, and a $399 machine is a rounding error against that education. Our AI models and tools hub tracks the wider release cadence this belongs to, and the same sim-to-real reasoning applies to the sensing side of IoT solutions work.

Frequently Asked Questions About Microduck

Is Microduck fully open source?

The software is, under Apache 2.0 — the control stack, the training pipeline and all seven shipped policies. The hardware is not, and Pollen Robotics has said it has no plans to open source it.

Can Microduck be trained without a powerful computer?

Yes. Training runs in the MuJoCo simulator, which can execute on Hugging Face Jobs rather than local hardware, and the resulting ONNX policy is copied to the robot.

How long does the Microduck battery last?

About one hour on the removable NP-F550 cell. Spare batteries come in the $39 Charger Pack and the $119 Dev Pack.

What can the beak actually pick up?

Around 100 g — socks, pens, small balls. It is a single-degree-of-freedom gripper, not a dexterous hand.

When will Microduck ship?

First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026, to the United States, Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and South Korea, with more countries stated to follow.