AIBRIEF
Built by Pollen Robotics (owned by Hugging Face), the 25cm bipedal Microduck opens preorders with AI training tools and an SDK on GitHub: the chassis and electronics stay locked, with no plans to open them.
Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics opened preorders Thursday for Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal robot priced at $399 before taxes and shipping, with first units due in North America, Europe, and the UK before Christmas 2026.
The robot runs on a Rockchip RK3566 chip with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, drawing roughly an hour of runtime from a removable NP-F550 battery. A front camera and an 8x8 time-of-flight LiDAR matrix feed two IMUs through a 50Hz control loop. Pollen says the device walks, crouches, rights itself, and picks up small objects with a beak-like gripper. An accessory pack adds roller-skate feet and a laser pointer.
The "open source" label covers the software only. The SDK, robot software, and a separate reinforcement-learning and sim-to-real repository are already public on GitHub. Pollen's press kit is explicit that the open-source statement does not extend to the mechanical or electronic design files, and a Pollen representative told The Register there are no plans to release them. The company has asked journalists not to call the hardware open source.
The arrangement is not new. Pollen's tabletop Reachy Mini has shipped more than 10,000 units on the same open-software, closed-chassis model since launching last year. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue framed the new device on X as "a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning," a post that drew 4.4 million views. Pollen has not yet disclosed Microduck preorder numbers.