Hugging Face Puts a $399 Robot Duck on Wheels
Microduck can walk, recover from falls and learn new behaviors, giving developers a small physical platform for reinforcement learning.
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Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics has unveiled Microduck, a 9.8-inch bipedal robot that can walk, sit, kick a ball, pick up objects with its beak and, with optional wheels, move around on roller skates.
Preorders opened on Thursday, 27 August, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK. Pollen Robotics joined Hugging Face in April 2025.
Microduck ships with seven trained movements, a battery and a game controller, allowing it to work without programming. It can react to its surroundings and recover from common falls. A separate $39 accessory pack includes roller attachments, a ball, laser pointer and NFC tags, according to the product page.
Beneath its toy-like design is a platform for experimenting with physical AI. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called it an “open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning,” a method through which systems improve their behavior using repeated trials and feedback.
Developers can first train movements in a physics simulator before transferring them to the physical robot, reducing the need to repeatedly test unfinished behaviors on the hardware.
“The behaviors shipping with Microduck are not meant to define what the robot can do forever,” Pollen Robotics said. “They are a starting point.”
Its software development kit, simulation environment and reinforcement-learning tools are available under an open-source licence on GitHub. The robot itself, however, is not fully open source: its mechanical and electronic design files remain proprietary.
Inside the small frame are 15 motors, a camera, microphone, speaker, LiDAR, motion sensors, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A removable battery lasts about an hour, depending on use.
Hugging Face is betting that developers will eventually share new robot behaviors much as they already exchange AI models, turning Microduck into a compact test bed for embodied AI rather than merely an elaborate desk companion.
