Tools AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-27

A 25-centimetre robot that walks, kicks and roller-skates, for $399 — and every behaviour on it can be retrained

Pollen Robotics, the French robotics company Hugging Face acquired last year, opened pre-orders on 27 August for Microduck, a two-legged robot 25 centimetres tall and around 800 grams. It carries 15 motors, a wide-angle camera, LiDAR, microphones, a speaker and two inertial sensors, and its articulated beak doubles as a small gripper. Seven behaviours ship already trained — walking, sitting and standing, kicking, grabbing an object, roller skating and getting back on its feet after a fall — running on a 50 Hz control loop on the robot itself. The part that matters for anyone trying to learn is that the SDK, the MuJoCo physics simulation and the reinforcement-learning training stack are all released under Apache-2.0, and the seven shipped policies can be inspected and retrained: you train a new behaviour in simulation, then push it to the hardware. The introductory price is $399 before tax and shipping, with delivery promised before Christmas 2026.

Why it mattersLegged robots have stayed a laboratory item because the hardware costs five figures and the control policies are proprietary. Microduck is not a better robot than those; it is a cheaper on-ramp to the same workflow — train in a simulator, deploy to a real body, watch it fail, retrain. That loop is essentially all of modern robot learning, and until now you needed a research budget to close it even once. A school lab, or one student, can now close it for the price of a phone.

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A 25-centimetre robot that walks, kicks and roller-skates, for $399 — and every behaviour on it can be retrained

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