Hugging Face puts a $399 trainable duck robot on sale

A 25-centimeter duck is about to waddle into homes. Hugging Face is selling its Microduck for $399, with shipments scheduled before Christmas. The little robot can pick up objects weighing up to 800 grams with its beak, recover when it falls, crouch and roller skate.

The hardware sees through a camera and lidar sensors, while two IMUs — inertial measurement units that report movement — track how its body is moving. Those sensors give developers the raw material for teaching behaviors rather than merely triggering a fixed set of factory routines.

Pollen Robotics says the training loop can begin in simulation, then move directly onto the robot. Developers can fine-tune the duck, retrain it and deploy the updated behavior again. Hugging Face makes the software development kit, simulation and full reinforcement-learning training stack available on GitHub.

The price puts Microduck below Hugging Face’s existing $499 Reachy Mini, while the $399 Reachy Mini Lite is powered by a Mac or PC. The company acquired French startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025 to build affordable, open-source AI hardware.

So what changes in practice? A developer can buy the robot, train a behavior in simulation, deploy it on the machine and fine-tune it there. But open code is not a privacy guarantee: installed applications may access the robot’s cameras and microphones and, depending on their design, send information to outside services.