Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face are putting Microduck on sale — a biped robot for $399. What is open is not just the control code but the whole training environment: locomotion policies are trained in MuJoCo, and the firmware ships under Apache 2.0. Deliveries are promised before Christmas.
Key takeaways
- Price $399, deliveries promised before Christmas 2026
- Roughly 25 cm tall, about 800 g
- Fifteen servos driven by a 50 Hz control loop on a Rockchip RK3566
- Policies trained in MuJoCo with PPO and exported to ONNX
- Firmware and documentation released under Apache 2.0
What the duck does
Microduck walks, driven from a gamepad. Knock it over and it stands itself back up. It picks objects off the floor with its beak at the press of one button. Fit the wheels and it loads a different model and rolls instead of walking — a separate policy, not a mode inside the same code.
It also sits, kicks a ball and quacks in a voice of its own. The camera streams over WebRTC and distance comes from a ToF sensor. Raw footage of the robot in motion was posted by Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.
The whole stack is open, not just the code
A Rockchip RK3566 sits at the centre. The software is Rust, no framework, built as a set of daemons with separate responsibilities.
A handful of independent processes keep the robot running:
The second repository is the more interesting one. microduck_rl holds the full sim2real recipe — MuJoCo, PPO, domain randomisation and the ONNX export the firmware loads. It already has 740 stars on GitHub.
The price gap matters. The open 3D-printable humanoid we wrote about in May cost $2,500. Microduck lands at a sixth of that.
Why it matters
The barrier to learning robot control stops being a hardware problem. Until now, touching real sim2real meant a lab or several thousand dollars. When the full training pipeline is public and the platform costs about as much as a good keyboard, reinforcement learning on a physical robot becomes a weekend activity rather than a grant project.
What’s next?
- Deliveries promised before Christmas 2026 according to TechCrunch
- The microduck_rl repository ships a complete sim2real toolchain, so new policies can come from outside Pollen Robotics
- No production volume or availability outside the US has been stated — the main unknown before launch
