Pollen Robotics, a team under Hugging Face, has launched the mini bipedal robot Microduck, with its software stack and reinforcement learning training code open-sourced under Apache 2.0. The robot is available for pre-sale at $399 (excluding tax and shipping). The company emphasizes that the open-source scope is limited to software, and mechanical and circuit design files have not been released, thus it cannot be classified as open-source hardware.

The robot stands 25 cm tall and weighs approximately 800 grams (the store lists it as 780 grams), featuring 15 servos covering the legs, head, and neck. It is equipped with a Rockchip RK3566, an on-chip accelerator, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. Sensors include a front camera, an 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR, one inertial measurement unit each for the body and head, a microphone, and a speaker, with NFC on both the head and beak. The detachable NP-F550 battery provides about one hour of runtime. It comes with seven retrainable strategies out of the box, with a control loop at 50 Hz.

The physical robot can walk using a controller, stand up after falling, pick up objects with its movable beak, sit down, squat, kick a ball, and roll forward. By adding wheels to the feet, it can switch to another strategy to glide, turn, go downhill, and stand up while in skating mode. Each unit generates and binds a lifetime voiceprint upon first boot, communicating with a short sound resembling biological rather than assistant-like calls, and can also follow a laser pointer and react to the environment. The training environment microduck_rl is based on MuJoCo/MuJoCo Warp with PPO, exporting to ONNX after 50 Hz training; domain randomization includes motor friction, battery voltage, control delay, and servo backlash. Without a local GPU, remote training can be done via Hugging Face Jobs.

During operation, it is split into independent daemons using Rust: robotd is responsible for 50 Hz control, strategies, and safety gates, while updaterd handles signature verification and failure rollback for over-the-air upgrades. Other services include configuration, Bluetooth, controller, camera audio, WebRTC, and depth sensors, communicating via Unix Socket and JSON-RPC 2.0. Only robotd can drive the motors; phones, controllers, and custom programs only send action intentions. The upgrade path involves downloading the release package, verifying signatures, switching versions, rebooting, and health checks, with automatic rollback to the previous version in case of exceptions to avoid bricking. The main repository has about 1200 stars.

Pollen was founded in France in 2016 by former Inria researchers and will merge into Hugging Face's robotics team in April 2025, having previously launched the desktop interactive robot Reachy Mini. Microduck is the second consumer-oriented product, shifting its positioning from "interactive desktop pet" to "a reinforcement learning platform that can simulate to real machines on the desktop." It comes in four colors: cream, graphite, lavender, and sky, with pre-sales starting on August 27. The initial plan was to deliver the first batch in North America, Europe, and the UK before Christmas; however, the store now indicates that there are too many community orders, and new year goods cannot be guaranteed to arrive by Christmas, with new orders estimated to take 4 to 6 months, with earlier orders prioritized. Camera resolution, radar range, wireless versions, and software development kit languages are still marked as tentative.

Buyers are developers, classrooms, and enthusiasts looking to practice bipedal control, simulate to real machines, and develop embodied strategies, exchanging $399 for a physical closed-loop system that can walk, fall, and retrain. The seller is Hugging Face: transferring the collaborative model from the model center to physical products, with software open-sourced to encourage community strategy feedback, while hardware remains closed-source to protect BOM and gross margins. Funding shifts from cloud inference subscriptions to desktop robot pre-sales; beneficiaries include developers who can exchange ONNX strategies on the Hub, as well as the RK3566 supply chain. The pressure point remains on educational bipedal platforms still priced in the thousands of dollars, and buyers who interpret "open-source" as being able to build entire machines—since the designs are not public, what is replicated is the strategy, not the whole duck. The event-driven aspect is clear: after the open-source model war over weights, the next battle is for affordable real machine entry.

Source: Public information