Last updated: 2026-11-04
Pollen Robotics is a robotics company best known for Reachy, an open-source humanoid upper body used in research labs. Hugging Face, the company behind the most widely used hub for open AI models, acquired Pollen in 2025 to bring its open-source approach to physical robots. The first result for consumers was Reachy Mini, a desktop robot. Microduck, announced in August 2026, is the second.
Microduck’s pitch is less about what it can do out of the box and more about how it learns. Every skill it ships with, from waddling to getting up after a fall, is a reinforcement-learning policy trained in a physics simulator and then transferred to the real robot. That is the same sim-to-real method used to train much larger humanoids. Because the training tools are open source, an owner with a suitable GPU, or cloud credits, can teach the duck a new trick and share it with others.
At US$399, that brings a full robot-learning workflow within reach of students, hobbyists and small labs that could never justify a five-figure humanoid. The trade-offs are clear from the specification: a one-hour battery, a beak that lifts only light objects, and hardware designs that remain closed.
Microduck had been on pre-order for nearly two months when Jensen Huang brought them on stage at NVIDIA’s October 2026 GTC keynote on 21 October 2026. Not every somersault landed, which arguably helped. The demo doubled as an advert for NVIDIA’s robot-training stack, showing a course built in simulation, policies trained in the cloud, checked on an RTX Spark workstation and deployed to the ducks. Within a day, Hugging Face said pre-orders had passed 20,000.
Demand on that scale has costs. Pollen’s original plan was to ship the first ducks before Christmas 2026. By late October, new buyers were told to expect shipping after April 2027.
Most consumer robots hide how they work. Microduck makes the training process the product, and NVIDIA’s US$12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face puts that open approach inside the company that sells most of the world’s AI training hardware. Whether Microduck turns out to be a passing Christmas craze or a real on-ramp to robotics, it is one of the first times a sim-to-real robot has been sold, at toy prices, to ordinary buyers.
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