Pollen robotics

Microduck is a 25 cm biped robot with 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR and a grasping beak, sold as an open-source platform where users can train new behaviors in simulation and run them on the physical robot. It targets developers, students, and researchers working on reinforcement learning and physical AI, a group that has historically needed far more expensive hardware to get started. Standing just 25 cm tall and weighing 780 grams, it is designed to be a platform for hobbyists and researchers interested in reinforcement learning, and at $399 it costs a fraction of what comparable research robots typically do. The launch matters because it lands inside Hugging Face's broader push into robotics. Pollen Robotics, founded in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, was acquired by Hugging Face earlier in 2025, bringing its Reachy humanoid line into the company. Microduck extends that catalog downward from Reachy 2, a $70,000 research humanoid, to a palm-sized robot priced for individual buyers, with behaviors learned in physics simulation on your own machine or on Hugging Face Jobs before being deployed to the hardware. Out of the box the robot is already usable, and its 15 degrees of freedom let it walk with a waddling gait, sit, crouch, recover from falls, and roller skate, while an articulated beak doubles as a gripper for picking up small objects. Each unit gets its own audio identity the first time it wakes up and keeps that voice for life, and the open-source software stack covers robot control, simulation, reinforcement learning, and sim-to-real deployment through the main Microduck repository and a separate Microduck RL repository. Pre-orders open at $399 across four colorways (Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky), with 32GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on board , and Pollen says units will ship before Christmas.