Quick answer: Microduck is a 25 cm, 800 g open-source biped robot made by Pollen Robotics, Hugging Face's robotics team. It costs $399 before taxes and shipping, and pre-orders opened Aug 27, 2026 (Pollen Robotics). NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang showed off Microducks at the GTC Berlin keynote on Oct 21, 2026 (TechCrunch).
Specs (Pollen Robotics)
- 15 motors, 25 cm tall, 800 g
- Camera, plus LiDAR and two IMUs
- 7 trained moves in the box (Pollen lists walk, sit & stand, kick, grab, roller skating with skates fitted, and get back up)
- 50 Hz onboard policy loop
- Apache-2.0 software. The SDK, the simulation and the training stack are on GitHub (pollen-robotics/microduck).
- Four colorways, plus optional Charger and Accessory packs
How it learns
Microduck is trained in MuJoCo simulation. Pollen calls MuJoCo "the physics sim every policy is trained in," and its official RL repo uses mjlab (MuJoCo Warp) with PPO (Pollen, GitHub). Owners can retrain and share policies. NVIDIA has also released an Isaac Lab training workflow (NVIDIA on Hugging Face, Oct 21, 2026).
The NVIDIA connection
- Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics on Apr 14, 2025 (Hugging Face blog).
- NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face; the deal hasn't closed. Per NVIDIA's SEC 8-K, the definitive agreement includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price, subject to adjustments, plus an equity retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for employees. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval (SEC 8-K; NVIDIA blog, Sept 3, 2026).
Demand
TechCrunch reports that pre-orders passed 20,000 the day after the keynote, per a tweet from Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, with delivery expected by Christmas. MoovX hasn't independently verified that count.
FAQ
- How much is Microduck? $399 before taxes and shipping (Pollen).
- Is it a toy? Pollen pitches it as "playable out of the box" and retrainable. The promo material shows both adults and kids.
- Who makes it? Pollen Robotics, which is part of Hugging Face. NVIDIA's purchase of Hugging Face is still pending.
Sources
Pollen Robotics product page; Hugging Face blog (Apr 14, 2025); NVIDIA blog (Sept 3, 2026); NVIDIA 8-K (Sept 2, 2026); TechCrunch (Oct 23, 2026). No affiliate links.
