Hugging Face's robotics team prices a 25cm walking duck at $399

Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux team that became Hugging Face's robotics arm in April 2025, has set out the specification and price of its second consumer robot.

Microduck is a biped, 25cm tall and 14cm wide, weighing under 800g. It has 15 motors across articulated legs, head and neck.

Pre-orders open on 27 August 2026 at an introductory $399 before taxes and shipping. First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026, in North America and Europe.

The company says the robot walks with a waddle, sits, crouches, roller-skates, picks objects up with its beak and rights itself from many common fall positions. Seven trained moves ship in the box.

Sensing is unusually dense for the price. There is a front camera, a compact LiDAR with an 8x8 time-of-flight matrix, two inertial measurement units — one in the body, one in the head — and two NFC antennas, in the head and the beak.

Compute is a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The onboard control policy runs at 50Hz.

Power comes from a removable NP-F550 camera battery, the 2,600mAh part familiar from video kit. Pollen Robotics puts runtime at around one hour, depending on use.

A game controller is included, so the robot is playable before anyone writes code. The camera has a dedicated use indicator modelled on old recording lights.

The software stack is open source: virtual training environments, reinforcement learning scripts and a tested sim-to-real workflow, which the company says will be released before the first robots ship. The mechanical and electronic design files are not covered by that, and Pollen Robotics asks that the robot not be described as open-source hardware.

Three add-on packs are listed. A charger pack with two batteries is $39, an accessory pack with rollers, a ball, a laser pointer and NFC tags is also $39, and a $119 dev pack bundles three spare motors, cables, two batteries, a charger, NFC tags, tools and Hugging Face credit.

Four printed colourways go on sale at launch — cream, graphite, lavender and sky — with identical hardware underneath.

Several specifications are still open. Camera resolution and field of view, LiDAR range, radio versions, SDK languages and any age recommendation have not been settled.

Pollen Robotics was founded in 2016 by former Inria researchers. Microduck follows Reachy Mini, its first consumer machine.

For founders building on hobbyist robotics, the interesting number is not $399 but the spare-parts list. A vendor that sells three motors and five cables in a $119 kit is planning for owners who break things and keep going. The pre-order date is the deadline that matters: 27 August 2026, roughly four months before the delivery target.

More: Pollen Robotics' Microduck repository · the Pollen Robotics community server