Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics Opens Microduck Preorders at $399
Pollen Robotics, the French robotics lab Hugging Face acquired last year, opened preorders on August 27 for Microduck, a 25 cm, 800 g biped priced at $399 before tax and shipping. That’s an introductory price across all four colorways, with first units targeted for delivery before Christmas 2026 in North America and Europe.
The number matters mostly for contrast. It sits three orders of magnitude below the same lab’s Reachy 2, the $70,000 bimanual research platform Hugging Face priced last year. Microduck isn’t a scaled-down Reachy — it’s a different product category: 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR and two IMUs running a 50 Hz onboard policy loop, shipped with seven pre-trained moves (walk, sit and stand, kick, grab, roller-skate, and recovery from a fall). The SDK, simulator and full reinforcement-learning training stack are open-sourced on GitHub under Apache-2.0, so the “walk” you get in the box is meant to be retrained, not just used.
That positions Microduck closer to a hobbyist robotics kit or classroom tool than a labor platform — there’s no stated payload rating, no enterprise SKU, and no claim it does useful work out of the box. It’s a useful data point on where the floor for a legged, sensor-equipped robot with real actuators now sits, at least for a device whose job is to teach embodied-AI policies rather than fetch anything. We haven’t seen unit-cost breakdowns from Hugging Face, so it’s not clear how much of the $399 is subsidized against the open-source ecosystem play versus priced to margin.
As with any first batch from a young hardware program, delivery timing is the thing to watch — “before Christmas” is a promise, not a shipped unit. We’ll track the price and any availability changes on Microduck’s index page.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.
- Pollen Robotics — Microduck (pollen-robotics.com)