Hugging Face, the company best known as a hub for sharing open-source AI models, opened pre-orders on August 27 for something a little different: a $399 robot shaped like a duck.
The Microduck, built with French robotics company Pollen Robotics, stands about 25 centimeters tall, weighs under 800 grams, and is packed with 15 motors, a camera, a LiDAR sensor, two inertial measurement units, a microphone, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Out of the box, it comes with seven pre-trained behaviors — walking, sitting, standing, kicking, grabbing small objects with its beak, roller skating, and getting back up after falling over.
The real point of the Microduck isn’t what it can already do, though — it’s what developers can teach it to do next. Hugging Face is releasing the robot’s simulation tools, control software, and reinforcement-learning stack as fully open source, letting developers train new behaviors on a laptop in simulation and then transfer them directly to the physical robot, a process the company calls sim-to-real deployment. That kind of experimentation has traditionally required expensive, specialized lab equipment; Hugging Face is betting that a $399 price tag can bring it to far more people.
It’s worth being clear about what “open source” covers here: the software stack is open, but Pollen Robotics has said it has no plans to release the actual hardware blueprints, so you can’t build your own Microduck from scratch. The beak’s grip is modest too, capable of lifting only around 100 grams, roughly the weight of a large apple.
The Microduck builds on Hugging Face’s earlier Reachy Mini desktop robots, released after the company acquired Pollen Robotics in 2025. Pre-orders are open now in Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky colorways, with the first units expected to ship before Christmas across North America, Europe, and the UK. It’s less a polished consumer gadget than an accessible research tool — but for developers curious about physical AI, $399 is a low bar to start experimenting.