Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics launch the open-source Microduck robot

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics, the French robotics company it acquired in April 2025, introduced Microduck, a 25-centimetre bipedal robot aimed at people building and training physical AI. It was priced at $399 with pre-orders open and deliveries expected before the end of 2026.

What set it apart was less the hardware than the software model behind it. Every movement Microduck makes — walking, sitting, crouching, kicking, picking up objects with an articulated beak, roller-skating, and getting back up after a fall — is a neural policy trained in a physics simulator and then exported to the physical robot. Pollen Robotics published the training environments, reward functions, domain-randomisation settings and the full sim-to-real recipe on GitHub, alongside a reinforcement-learning toolkit, so that owners can train new behaviours the same way rather than scripting them. The robot weighs under 800 grams and carries fifteen motors, a camera, depth sensing and two inertial measurement units, and ships with several trained moves usable out of the box.

The launch extended Hugging Face’s push into open robotics, following its LeRobot library and the Pollen acquisition, and drew attention chiefly for putting a complete, inspectable reinforcement-learning-to-hardware pipeline in a hobbyist-priced package — lowering the cost of experimenting with embodied AI.