Overview
Microduck is Hugging Face's $399 open-source bipedal duck robot from its Pollen Robotics team (Bordeaux), opened for pre-orders on August 27, 2026: 25 cm tall, under 800 g, 15 servos driven at a 50 Hz control rate by a Rockchip RK3566 with NPU, plus a camera, a small LiDAR, two IMUs, mic/speaker and NFC. It ships with seven pre-trained behaviors — waddling, standing up after falls, picking objects up with its beak, crouching, kicking and roller-skating. The pitch is the training loop, not the tricks: the SDK, MuJoCo simulation environment and full RL training stack are published under Apache 2.0 (hardware design files are not), so owners train a behavior in simulation — mjlab/MuJoCo Warp PPO at 4,096 parallel environments, roughly 1–2 hours per gait — export to ONNX and deploy directly to the robot, matching its 50 Hz control rhythm with modeled actuator friction, backlash and domain randomization. The published spec sheet puts it at 25 cm tall, 0.8 kg, 15 degrees of freedom, 1 hour (2,600 mAh) of rated runtime. Listed pricing starts around $399 (pre-order; ships before Christmas 2026). Positioned for reinforcement-learning education; sim2real research; hobbyist platform. Microduck is in the pre-order phase — expect a wait between deposit and delivery. Verification level: partial — core specs are corroborated, edge cases are maker claims.
