Hugging Face's Microduck robot opens pre-orders: a $399 bipedal learning platform that picks up socks

Hugging Face's robotics partner Pollen Robotics is accepting pre-orders for Microduck, a diminutive bipedal robot designed as both a capable physical platform and an accessible entry point into reinforcement learning. Priced at $399 introductory cost, the 25-centimeter-tall robot is expected to begin shipping before the end of the year in North America and Europe.

What Microduck can do#

The robot moves beyond being a novelty gadget. Standing about 800 grams and featuring a beak-like gripper, Microduck arrives with seven pre-trained capabilities: walking, sitting and standing, kicking, object manipulation, roller-skating, and self-recovery from falls. Its suite of sensors—a front-facing camera, an 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR array, and dual inertial measurement units—enable environmental awareness and balance control.

Purpose-built for training and experimentation#

Microduck functions as a successor to Reachy Mini, shifting focus from desktop-bound human interaction toward embodied learning tasks. The platform pairs a real robot with an open-source SDK, reinforcement learning scripts, and a physics simulator based on MuJoCo Warp (built on Nvidia's Warp framework). According to the development team, this architecture lets users "train a behavior in simulation, transfer it to real hardware, see what went wrong, and try again."

The simulator enables parallel training across thousands of virtual robots simultaneously. Training a walking policy across 4,096 simulated ducks in parallel, for instance, produces usable movement patterns within one to two hours. The project supports 13 distinct task families, including acrobatic moves and behaviors leveraging passive wheel attachments mounted beneath the feet.

Training requires either a personal Nvidia GPU or access to Hugging Face's cloud infrastructure. The robot itself runs on a Rockchip RK3566 processor paired with an AI accelerator, carrying 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

Developer-friendly design and extensibility#

The entire codebase is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, though hardware design files carry a non-commercial restriction to prevent unauthorized cloning. A full simulator runs in a browser for no-commitment experimentation, while purchasers receive a game controller for manual operation.

Pollen Robotics is bundling optional accessories: a Charger Pack ($39) providing spare batteries and charging equipment, and a Dev Pack ($119) including replacement motors, additional batteries, NFC tags, Hugging Face cloud credits, and tools for hardware maintenance and modification.