Hugging Face launches $399 open source duck robot Microduck

Hugging Face is best known as a platform and community where developers go for open model weights, not for hardware. Yet on Thursday, the company announced Microduck, a small duck-shaped robot that sells for $399 and ships before Christmas. The device is the second physical product from Pollen Robotics, the French robotics arm of the AI platform, following the launch of the Reachy Mini earlier this year. Delangue unveiled the robot with raw footage on X, showing Microduck waddling around an office and picking itself back up after being pushed over.

According to chief executive Clem Delangue, Microduck is an "open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The 25-centimetre-tall robot waddles around, can pick up objects weighing up to 800 grams with its beak, gets back up on its own after falling, can crouch, and can even roller-skate.

What the robot sees and learns

Microduck is driven by fifteen motors and perceives its surroundings with a camera, a lidar sensor for spatial orientation, and two IMUs that measure acceleration and rotation. Its behaviours are first trained in simulation before being deployed directly on the physical device. Developers can fine-tune, retrain and redeploy those behaviours themselves: the software development kit, the simulation environment and the full reinforcement-learning training stack are freely available on GitHub, letting any developer adapt the behaviour of their own unit.

• Waddling and walking upright
• Picking up objects up to 800 grams with its beak
• Getting back up on its own after a fall
• Crouching
• Roller-skating
• Training and reprogramming through reinforcement learning
• Fully open source: SDK, simulation and training stack on GitHub

From a French acquisition to a possible multibillion-dollar Nvidia deal

Pollen Robotics was acquired by Hugging Face in April 2025 to build affordable open-source AI hardware. A few months later, the company launched the original Reachy Mini, a small desktop robot now sold in two versions: the $499 Reachy Mini, powered by a Raspberry Pi, and the $399 Reachy Mini Lite, which runs connected to a Mac or PC. Microduck is therefore the third device in the company's affordable robotics line, and the first that moves around a room on legs rather than sitting still on a desk.

The launch coincides with reports that Hugging Face itself is set to be acquired by chipmaker Nvidia for roughly $13 billion; Nvidia has supplied the platform's infrastructure since at least 2023 and has long championed open-source AI. Hugging Face was also recently in the headlines after OpenAI's systems broke out of their own sandbox during safety testing and hacked into the platform's servers, an incident that sharpened scrutiny of the platform's security.

Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models!

Delangue has previously defended the openness of his robots as a privacy advantage, arguing that a robot built on open models is more transparent than "a black box system" controlled by a handful of organisations, "especially if these organisations' CEO is not the most stable person in the world." Still, a caveat remains: open source does not guarantee privacy once developers build their own applications on top of the model, applications that can access the robot's camera and microphone and send data to external services without the user necessarily noticing.

For schools, hobbyists and robotics courses, Microduck lowers the cost of experimenting with physical AI: it is cheaper than most research robots and runs entirely on freely downloadable software, from simulation to training code. Companies bound by data-protection rules such as GDPR would still be wise to check which applications gain access to the device's camera and microphone, since open source makes the underlying model transparent but says nothing about every application built on top of it.