Hugging Face unveils $399 duck robot Microduck

Microduck follows Hugging Face's acquisition of Pollen Robotics in April 2025, which began taking orders for the desk robot Reachy Mini in July of the same year. Reachy Mini has shipped over 10,000 units. While Reachy Mini focuses on voice-based conversation, Microduck focuses on learning physical actions. The company emphasizes that Microduck is not just Reachy Mini with legs, but a distinct platform for action-based AI.

The small size is deliberate: learning movement involves repeated failures, and large humanoids pose cost and safety issues with each fall. At 25cm, failures just mean a small robot toppling to the floor, and since it can get up on its own, there is no need for manual recovery. This aims to make legged-robot motion learning accessible at home or in classrooms without large research platforms.

The company hopes the community will create and share new policies, such as better walking or recovery behaviors, similar to how AI models are shared. They want physical behaviors to be shared with the environment and learning recipes needed for reproduction. Technical details are expected in future blog posts.