Bordeaux-based Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm of Hugging Face, opened preorders on August 27, 2026 for Microduck, a 25 cm open-source biped robot priced at $399 before taxes and shipping. First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026 in North America and Europe, with four colourways at launch.
A pocket biped built to teach reinforcement learning
Microduck stands 25 cm tall, weighs under 800 g and runs 15 degrees of freedom across articulated legs, head and neck on a Rockchip RK3566 with an on-board AI accelerator. Sensors include a front camera with a hardware REC indicator, two IMUs, an 8x8 time-of-flight LiDAR matrix, microphones, a speaker and NFC antennas in the head and beak. A removable NP-F550 camera battery delivers around an hour of runtime.
Out of the box, the duck walks with a waddle, sits, crouches, kicks, roller-skates and grabs objects with an articulated beak. It also recovers its balance from common fall positions and ships with a game controller so users can play immediately, before writing a line of code.
Open-source software from simulation to sim-to-real
Pollen is releasing an open-source SDK, virtual training environments, RL training scripts and a tested sim-to-real workflow before the first robots ship. Developers train a behaviour in simulation, deploy it to the physical robot at a 50 Hz onboard policy loop, adjust, retrain and publish the resulting policy - crucially, sharing it through Hugging Face's hub alongside the models the rest of the community trains.
The open-source label covers software only - mechanical and electronic design files are not being released, so Microduck is not open-source hardware. Even so, at $399 it undercuts the sub-$2,500 HopeJR bipedal reference Hugging Face published earlier and lands well below the sub-$400 open-source walker threshold that has kept classroom robotics out of reach.
Riding a fast-moving physical-AI wave
Microduck is Pollen's second consumer robot after Reachy Mini and its first launch since Hugging Face acquired the company in April 2025 - the same month the NVIDIA-Hugging Face LeRobot tie-up around Isaac GR00T began landing teleop datasets on the hub. The launch also follows a $40M seed for Paris humanoid startup Uma NorthStar, whose founder Remi Cadene ran Hugging Face's LeRobot team - see our Uma coverage - underscoring how much European hardware money is now chasing the open-source physical-AI stack.
Preorders, colours and what's still to come
The four Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky shells are printed onto the same robot; the game controller is included. Camera resolution and field of view, LiDAR range, radio versions and SDK language coverage are still being finalised. Pollen is opening preorders on its store today and shipping before Christmas 2026 - the SDK will land before the first robots do.
Reporting based on coverage from Pollen Robotics press kit, Digital Trends, TechEBlog and 1CW.