Microduck is a 25 cm biped robot made by Pollen Robotics, the team behind the Reachy robots and part of Hugging Face since 2025. It walks, kicks a ball, sits down and stands back up, scoops small objects with its beak and picks itself up after a fall. You can drive it with the included game controller on day one, and when you want more, you can teach it new behaviours yourself.
How it moves
Fifteen motors spread across the legs, neck and head give Microduck its walk and its expressions. Two IMUs, one in the body and one in the head, tell it which way is up. That is what lets it recover its balance when nudged and stand up on its own after landing on its back.
Each move is a trained policy: a small neural network that runs on the robot 50 times per second, reading the sensors and deciding where every motor should go next. The robot ships with seven of them, including walking, sitting and standing, kicking, grabbing, getting up and, with the optional rollers fitted, roller-skating.
What it can sense
A wide-angle camera looks forward from the head. A compact LiDAR with an 8×8 time-of-flight grid measures distance. Microphones and a speaker handle sound, and two NFC antennas, one in the head and one in the beak, let it react to tagged objects such as the cards in the Accessory pack.
Teaching it new tricks
All of Microduck’s behaviours were trained in MuJoCo, a physics simulator, and then transferred to the real robot. The same training stack is published on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, so you can do the same:
- Train a behaviour in simulation on your own computer or on Hugging Face Jobs.
- Deploy it to the robot.
- Adjust the simulation where the real robot behaves differently, then train again.
- Share the finished policy with the community.
You can try the official simulator in your browser before you order. It shows the virtual twin the ducks were trained on.
Who it is for
Microduck sits between a toy and a research platform. It is fun with a controller, and it is a hands-on way to learn reinforcement learning and sim-to-real robotics without a lab budget. Makers, students, teachers and AI developers are the people it was built for.
Price and availability
Microduck is on pre-order now in four colours: Sky, Cream, Graphite and Lavender. In the US it costs $399 before tax. Choose your colour and pre-order here.