Hugging Face-backed open-source robotics company Pollen Robotics has unveiled Microduck, a $399 bipedal robot. It stands just 25 centimeters tall and weighs about 800 grams, but it packs 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, and two IMUs. Right out of the box, it'll walk, sit, grab things, kick a ball, and pick itself up after a tumble. Add wheels, and it can even roll around.
Microduck's moves can be retrained from scratch. You train new behaviors in the MuJoCo physics simulator using reinforcement learning, then deploy the trained policy to the real robot. The SDK, simulator, and full reinforcement-learning training stack are all open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
Microduck is available for preorder now, with the first units expected to ship before Christmas 2026.