Somewhere in Bordeaux, a team of roboticists considered the great open problems of bipedal locomotion, looked out at the sprinting, backflipping, warehouse-striding humanoids currently absorbing several billion dollars of global attention, and concluded that what the field really needed was a duck.
Twenty five centimeters of duck. With an articulated beak. That roller skates.
They were right. Microduck sold more than 10,000 units in its first week on sale, crossing $4 million, which is a lot of money to move on the strength of a face that is 80 percent eyeball.
A robot built to be taken apart
Microduck is the new machine from Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux team now folded into Hugging Face, and the follow-up to Reachy Mini, the desktop robot that moved 3,000 units in its own first week. This one walks. It stands 25 cm tall and 14 cm wide, weighs under 800 grams, and moves on 15 motors running through its legs, neck, head and beak.
Inside there is a camera, an 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR, two IMUs (one in the body and one in the head, because the head has opinions of its own), microphones, a speaker, two NFC antennas, and a Rockchip RK3566 doing all the thinking onboard.
The battery is a removable NP-F550, the same cell that has been powering camera lights for twenty years, good for roughly an hour. Preorders opened on August 27 at an introductory $399.
The seven things it already knows
Out of the box it can walk, sit, stand, kick, grab an object in its beak, recover from falling flat on its back, and roller skate.
We want to be clear that roller skating is a factory feature, and not something a maniac in the community bolted on later.
How you teach it the eighth thing
Every one of those behaviors is a policy rather than a script, and every policy is published on GitHub under Apache 2.0 alongside the simulator and the complete training stack.
Training happens in MuJoCo through mjlab, using PPO across 4,096 parallel simulated ducks, and Pollen says a working gait takes one to two hours on a CUDA GPU. If you do not happen to have one of those lying around, it will run on Hugging Face Jobs instead.
Four thousand and ninety six imaginary ducks are falling over in parallel so that one real duck can learn to walk over to your coffee mug.
The detail that impressed us most is the boring one. To get a policy trained in simulation to survive contact with an actual living room carpet, Pollen randomizes all the things that go wrong on real hardware: battery voltage drifting, voltage sagging under load, command delay, friction, and about a degree of gear backlash across the servo joints. Sim-to-real transfer is where charming robot projects normally go to die. Budgeting for slop in advance is how you avoid that.
It knows perfectly well that it is a toy
The industrial design is doing something we almost never see in consumer robotics, which is admitting the thing is a toy and then being extremely good at it. Chunky orange feet. Panels you are meant to cover in stickers. A face made of one enormous eye and a beak, roughly the minimum viable quantity of face, which somehow reads as more alive than any glowing screen pretending to blink at you.
The add-on packs are honest, too. Thirty nine dollars for a dual charger and spare batteries. Thirty nine for the accessory kit. And $119 for a dev pack of spare motors, cables, tools and NFC tags, which is a quiet way of telling you that you are going to break it. That is a friendlier thing to say to a customer than most robotics companies manage.
Why this one is different
We have watched a steady run of home robots arrive at very serious prices attached to very narrow ambitions. An $8,000 laundry folding robot here, a robot companion animal there. Microduck runs in the opposite direction. It costs less than a decent lens, it makes no claim to usefulness whatsoever, and it hands you the entire training stack and dares you to teach it something idiotic.
The distance between wanting a robot and owning one has been a wall of money and expertise for a very long time. This is the first thing we have seen that turns the wall into a step.
I think we’re creating a new category of consumer robots here, which is AI native and kind of playful but also education tools.
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Hugging Face
Preorders are open now at Pollen Robotics, with shipping expected before Christmas, and the code is already on GitHub if you want to read it before you buy.
Ours would be Sky. Obviously.
