Hugging Face unveils Microduck, a $399 open-source robot

Hugging Face unveiled the Microduck on Thursday, a duck-like robot that sells for $399 and ships before Christmas, TechCrunch reported.

CEO Clem Delangue described it as an "open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The 25-centimeter-tall duck can waddle, pick up objects with its beak (up to 800 grams), get back up after falling, crouch, and roller skate. It perceives the world through a camera, lidar sensors, and two inertial measurement units. Pollen Robotics, the team behind it, says its behaviors can be trained in simulation and deployed straight onto the robot, and developers can fine-tune, re-train, and re-deploy it from there. The SDK, simulation environment, and full reinforcement-learning training stack are available on GitHub.

• Microduck price: $399
• Height: 25 centimeters
• Payload capacity: up to 800 grams
• Sensors: camera, lidar, two IMUs
• Reachy Mini (Raspberry Pi): $499
• Reachy Mini Lite (Mac/PC powered): $399

Hugging Face is best known as a platform where developers pull open model weights, not a hardware maker, but it acquired French startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025 specifically to build affordable, open-source AI hardware. A couple of months later the two launched Reachy Mini, a small desktop robot that now comes in two versions: the $499 Reachy Mini powered by a Raspberry Pi, and the $399 Reachy Mini Lite powered by a Mac or PC. The Microduck extends that lineup into something that moves around a room rather than sitting on a desk, part of a broader wave of physical AI hardware pushing past its early, clumsy stage.

A robot with a camera in bedrooms and private spaces invites an obvious question, and Delangue has addressed it before. He's told TechCrunch that bots run on open-source models are safer from a privacy standpoint than "a black box system" controlled by a few organizations, "especially if these organizations' CEO is not the most stable person in the world." Open source does give developers auditability and control, but it doesn't guarantee sensitive data stays private once consumers install third-party apps on top of the model, apps that can reach the bot's cameras and microphones and route that data to outside services depending on how they're built.

The launch lands as Hugging Face is reportedly close to being acquired by Nvidia at a valuation near $13 billion, a deal Intokened covered in detail this morning. Nvidia has supplied Hugging Face's infrastructure since at least 2023, and both companies have publicly pushed open-source AI for years. The company has also spent recent weeks dealing with the opposite of a product launch: the fallout from a cybersecurity incident where an OpenAI system breached its own sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's servers. A $399 duck that waddles and roller-skates is, at minimum, a change of pace.

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