Microduck: Hugging Face's $399 Open-Source RL Robot

Hugging Face unveiled the Microduck on Thursday: a $399 open-source robot, trainable with reinforcement learning, shipping before Christmas 2026.

What $399 buys

The Microduck is a one-eyed biped standing just under 10 inches — 25 centimeters — tall. Preorders are open now in cream, graphite, lavender, and sky blue, and Pollen Robotics says shipping starts "before Christmas 2026."

It runs on a Rockchip RK3566 processor and perceives the world with a camera, LiDAR, motion sensors, and two IMUs (inertial measurement units, which report the robot's own movement). The legs, head, and neck are articulated. Per TechCrunch, it can waddle, crouch, get back up after a fall, roller skate, and pick things up with its beak at up to 800 grams.

Demo footage shows it grabbing socks and markers and kicking a ball. Pollen Robotics says it also reacts to its surroundings, follows a laser pointer, and accepts game-controller input. Each unit generates its own voice: the company describes sounds "closer to a creature than an assistant," with an audio identity assigned the first time the robot wakes up and kept "for life."

Microduck vs the Reachy Mini line

Hugging Face acquired French startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025, and the Reachy Mini desktop robot followed a couple of months later. The Microduck is the second robot in that line, and it lands at the same price as the cheaper Reachy Mini.

Model	Price	Compute	Form
Microduck	$399	Rockchip RK3566 (onboard)	Mobile biped, ~25 cm
Reachy Mini	$499	Raspberry Pi (onboard)	Desktop
Reachy Mini Lite	$399	Tethered to a Mac or PC	Desktop

The comparison that matters is Microduck against Reachy Mini Lite: same price, but the Lite needs a host computer while the Microduck carries its own compute and can walk. If you want an untethered platform for locomotion and manipulation work, the Microduck is the cheaper entry. If you want the mature, already-shipping option, Reachy Mini is the one you can buy today rather than preorder.

The training loop is the actual product

Pollen Robotics says Microduck behaviors can be trained in simulation and deployed directly to the robot, then fine-tuned, retrained, and redeployed. The SDK, the simulator, and the full RL training stack are on GitHub, and the software is open-source like Reachy Mini's.

That sim-to-real loop is the part worth evaluating before you preorder. A $399 body is only useful if the simulator matches the hardware closely enough that policies trained offline survive the transfer — which is exactly what you cannot verify from a launch video. CEO Clem Delangue framed the launch as "the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models."

Two things to watch

First, ownership. TechCrunch reports Hugging Face is set to be acquired by Nvidia at a $13 billion valuation — a report, not a confirmed deal, but one that would put this hardware line under a very different owner before the first Microduck ships.

Second, privacy. TechCrunch notes that open source gives developers auditability and control, but not a guarantee that data stays private once consumers install third-party apps on top: those apps can reach the robot's cameras and microphones and forward what they capture to external services. A camera-equipped robot that walks around your home makes that a purchase question, not a footnote.

Preorders are live now; the practical next step is to pull the training stack from GitHub and run the simulator before committing $399 to a robot that ships months from now.