Microduck: The roller-skating open-source duckling

What it is

Microduck is a 25-centimeter bipedal robot duck, released for preorder by Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face on August 27, 2026, at $399. It carries 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that can grab things. It ships with seven trained behaviors — walking, sitting, standing, kicking, grabbing, self-righting from its back, and, the one every early write-up leads with, roller skating.

The more consequential sentence is the licensing one: the SDK, the simulation environment, and the entire reinforcement-learning training stack are published on GitHub under Apache-2.0. The physics simulation runs on MuJoCo, and all seven shipped behavior policies are public and retrainable. Microduck is not a toy with an API bolted on; it is an open robotics platform that happens to be shaped like a duckling.

What it does

Out of the box, it waddles, falls over convincingly, rights itself, and skates — behaviors trained in simulation and transferred to the physical robot. That sim-to-real loop is the actual product: Pollen and Hugging Face are betting that owners will retrain existing policies and share new ones, the way Reachy Mini owners already share apps through the Hugging Face Hub.

For a household, that means the robot’s repertoire on day 300 need not resemble day 1 — a genuine difference from the fixed-firmware companions in this registry. For a technically inclined owner, the published training stack is the rare case where “you can program it” means the full pipeline, not a sandboxed scripting layer.

Living with it

Nobody outside Pollen has lived with one yet — preorders opened in late August 2026 and first units ship to North America and Europe before Christmas 2026. We say so plainly rather than synthesizing reviews that don’t exist, and this page will change when owner evidence arrives.

What can be said now, from the published materials: there is no subscription and no cloud dependency for core function, the four colorways ship with sticker sheets and a community-customization pitch, and the community forming around it lives on Pollen’s Discord alongside the established LeRobot crowd. The battery-life and noise questions — the ones a household actually asks — have no independent answers yet. This entry carries a changelog; check the revision history below for what changed as units landed.

Context

Microduck is Pollen Robotics’ second small home robot after Reachy Mini, and the clearest expression yet of the Hugging Face thesis that open-source communities can do for robotics what they did for machine-learning models. If you are deciding between the two: Reachy Mini is the expressive desk companion with the mature app ecosystem; Microduck is the locomotion platform with the beak. The comparison page holds the details.