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.
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