Microduck robot waddles its way into spotlight with massive sales

Its low price point and durability for testing is what makes it special

Rowan Dunne

Published

26 minutes ago

A goofy little robot that waddles, topples over and picks itself up has just arrived as a clever plaything for tech fans who like to tinker around.

Hugging Face and its French team at Pollen Robotics launched Microduck on Aug. 27. They built it to give ordinary people a cheap way to train a real robot at home.

The software is completely open, so people can inspect and change it as they wish. You teach Microduck new skills through trial and error. First, a digital version of the robot practises inside a computer simulation that copies real-world physics, such as gravity and balance.

Once the moves work reliably there, you copy the successful training data and load it straight onto the actual duck so it can perform them in the real world.

It costs far less than most lab robots, so students, hobbyists and developers can try ideas without spending a fortune. Out of the box it already knows a handful of tricks, and you can reshape it however you like.

To me, microduck looks like a droid. So I made it sound like one

Microduck is open source and hackable. That means you can program it to do whatever you want!

I trained a 1.3m parameter LLM to output droid like responses. It is running in the browser

The model has learned to… pic.twitter.com/IGxq2Y765X

— Onur Solmaz (@onusoz) August 29, 2026

Microduck’s hardware, capabilities

The robot stands 25 centimetres tall and weighs under 800 grams. Its duck-like body holds fifteen motors that move the legs, neck and head. A camera, a small LiDAR sensor and two motion trackers help it see and stay balanced. The beak opens and closes so it can lift light objects from the floor.

Right now, it walks with a gentle sway, sits, crouches, kicks a ball, follows a laser dot and stands up after most falls. Add tiny wheels and it can even roller-skate. Later owners could one day teach it far more complex jobs, such as carrying items across a room or working with several ducks at once.

Pre-orders opened at US$399 before tax and shipping started last week, with four colours available. First units should reach buyers in North America and Europe before Christmas. Sales raced past US$2.6 million in the first 24 hours. Within only two days more than 7,200 were purchased online.

“Totally insane,” said Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf on social media.

Reachy Mini’s new sibling

Microduck builds on the earlier debut of Reachy Mini, also made by the same team. Both robots keep their software open and stay relatively affordable so more average people can enjoy fiddling around with them. More than 10,000 Reachy Minis have been sold, but it took Hugging Face over a year to do so.

Reachy Mini is a stationary desktop robot built for face-to-face interaction. It watches, listens, speaks and uses an expressive head and body so people can run real vision and conversation apps from a desk. Microduck leaves the desk to walk, fall and recover while amusing its owners. Together they show how small machines can help the masses learn about robots.

“I can’t wait to see a flock of them running, jumping and quacking everywhere,” said Pollen Robotics co-founder and CTO Pierre Rouanet, “and to see what the community builds with them.”

The coolest part of Microduck might not be the robot. It's how it learns to move.

This repo shows the full reinforcement learning pipeline behind Microduck.

The robot learns in simulation using MuJoCo, PPO and GPU-based training, then the trained policy is exported to ONNX and… https://t.co/JeoKy24kap pic.twitter.com/R5AVOF1U3o

— Praveen Kumar Verma (@Alacritic_Super) August 27, 2026