Microduck: The roller-skating open-source duckling

What it is

Microduck is a 25-centimeter bipedal robot duck, released for preorder by Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face on August 27, 2026, at $399. It carries 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that can grab things. It ships with seven trained behaviors — walking, sitting, standing, kicking, grabbing, self-righting from its back, and, the one every early write-up leads with, roller skating.

The more consequential sentence is the licensing one: the SDK, the simulation environment, and the entire reinforcement-learning training stack are published on GitHub under Apache-2.0. The physics simulation runs on MuJoCo, and all seven shipped behavior policies are public and retrainable. Microduck is not a toy with an API bolted on; it is an open robotics platform that happens to be shaped like a duckling.

What it does

Out of the box, it waddles, falls over convincingly, rights itself, and skates — behaviors trained in simulation and transferred to the physical robot. That sim-to-real loop is the actual product: Pollen and Hugging Face are betting that owners will retrain existing policies and share new ones, the way Reachy Mini owners already share apps through the Hugging Face Hub.

For a household, that means the robot’s repertoire on day 300 need not resemble day 1 — a genuine difference from the fixed-firmware companions in this registry. For a technically inclined owner, the published training stack is the rare case where “you can program it” means the full pipeline, not a sandboxed scripting layer.

Living with it

Nobody outside Pollen has lived with one yet — preorders opened in late August 2026 and first units ship to North America and Europe before Christmas 2026.

What the published materials do settle: there is no subscription and no cloud dependency for core function, the four colorways ship with sticker sheets and a community-customization pitch, and the community forming around it lives on Pollen’s Discord alongside the established LeRobot crowd. The battery-life and noise questions — the ones a household actually asks — have no independent answers yet.

Context

Microduck is Pollen Robotics’ second small home robot after Reachy Mini, and the clearest expression yet of the Hugging Face thesis that open-source communities can do for robotics what they did for machine-learning models. If you are deciding between the two: Reachy Mini is the expressive desk companion with the mature app ecosystem; Microduck is the locomotion platform with the beak. The comparison page holds the details.