Hugging Face Open-Sources $399 Duckie Machine: Falls Down, Gets Back Up, and Can Be Retrained

Dynamic Beating AI News: Hugging Face's open-source robotics company, Pollen Robotics, has unveiled Microduck, a bipedal robot priced at $399. Standing at just 25 cm tall and weighing around 800 g, it packs in 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, and two IMUs. Out of the box, it can walk, sit, pick up objects, play soccer, and even recover from falls on its own. With the addition of wheels, it can also glide.

Microduck's movements can be retrained by users. Initially, users train actions in the MuJoCo physics simulator using reinforcement learning and then transfer the trained policies to the real robot. The SDK, simulator, and full reinforcement learning training stack are all open-source, and the entire software suite is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Microduck is now available for pre-order, with the first batch set to ship before Christmas 2026.