Microduck

Microduck is a small bipedal robot duck made by Pollen Robotics, the robotics company that Hugging Face bought in 2025. It stands about 25 cm tall, weighs under 800 g and costs US$399 on pre-order. It is Hugging Face and Pollen’s second consumer robot after the Reachy Mini desktop robot. Microduck is built as a hands-on way to learn physical AI: its walking, sitting, kicking and fall-recovery skills are reinforcement-learning policies trained in simulation, and owners can train and share new ones.

The robot became a sensation on 21 October 2026, when NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang brought Microducks on stage during his GTC keynote. They waddled, sat down, “napped” and attempted somersaults, some more successfully than others, chirping as they went. Huang used them to show NVIDIA’s robot-training pipeline: a course set up in simulation, policies trained on cloud GPUs, checked on an RTX Spark machine and then deployed to the real robots. By the next day, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said pre-orders had passed 20,000 units.

Inside, Microduck has 15 motors driving its legs, neck, head and beak, a front camera, a small 8×8 depth sensor, two motion sensors (IMUs), microphones and a speaker, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. The articulated beak can pick up light objects. A 2,600 mAh battery gives roughly an hour of continuous use. The ducks do not speak words or decide for themselves what to do; each behaviour is a trained policy that turns sensor readings into motor commands. Roller-skating and laser-following tricks need accessories sold separately.

The software and reinforcement-learning tools are open source; the hardware design files are not. Pollen’s August launch targeted first deliveries before Christmas 2026 in several regions, including North America, but by late October the product page told new buyers to expect shipping after April 2027, on a first-ordered, first-shipped basis. Hugging Face itself is being acquired by NVIDIA in a US$12.9 billion deal announced in September 2026.