Hugging Face Opens Pre-Orders for $399 Microduck RL Biped

For $399, Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics unit is taking pre-orders on Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal duck robot with 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR sensor and two IMUs. It weighs under 800 grams, packs 32GB of storage and 1GB of RAM, and its 2,600mAh battery should be good for around one hour of continuous runtime. Shipping is before Christmas.

The demo reel is what you would expect from a duck: it can waddle, pick things up with its beak, recover from falls, crouch and roller skate.

The pitch is training, not tricks. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue calls it "an open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The SDK, MuJoCo simulation environment and full RL training stack are published under an Apache 2.0 license; policies train in mjlab/MuJoCo Warp with PPO, roughly 1–2 hours for a gait at 4096 environments, then deploy directly to the robot.

Microduck lands alongside Pollen's earlier desktop bots, the $499 Reachy Mini and $399 Reachy Mini Lite, extending Hugging Face's robotics push after it acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025. A one-hour battery and a beak-scale gripper make clear this is a hobby and research platform, not a warehouse worker.