Pollen Robotics, Hugging Face’s Bordeaux robotics team, opens pre-orders on a 25 cm biped built to train AI that acts, not just chats.
BORDEAUX, France — Pollen Robotics today unveiled Microduck, a 25-centimeter biped robot with 15 motors, a camera, a compact depth sensor, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that can pick things up. Pre-orders are open now at an introductory $399 before taxes and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe, and the UK.
The company says more than 10,000 Reachy Mini desktop robots have shipped since last year’s launch. Microduck is the follow-up, aimed at a different job. Where Reachy Mini was built to see, listen, and talk, Microduck is built to move: walk, sit, crouch, get back up from many common falls, and even roller-skate. It weighs under 800 grams and fits on a desk.
“A simple way to think about the two robots is that Reachy Mini is a platform for AI that interacts, while Microduck is a platform for AI that acts,” Pollen wrote in today’s announcement. The stack is open-source software for control, simulation, reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real. The mechanical and electronic design files are not open, the company noted, so it should not be described as open-source hardware.
Microduck ships with trained behaviors so it is playable out of the box, including gamepad walking and a laser-dot follow. It does not speak in words. Each unit gets its own generated audio identity the first time it wakes up. Onboard compute is a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. Runtime is about an hour on a removable NP-F550 camera battery.
Four colorways are available at launch: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. Specs such as camera resolution, LiDAR range, and any age recommendation are still being finalized.
Pollen Robotics was founded in 2016 by former Inria researchers and joined Hugging Face in April 2025. Pre-order and software links are on the official Microduck announcement: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/blog/introducing-microduck/
