Hugging Face Sells a $399 Microduck Robot With Its Training Stack on GitHub

Hugging Face’s Microduck pairs a $399, 25-centimeter duck-shaped robot with a public reinforcement-learning toolkit. The promise is a route from simulation to deployment on a physical machine. The launch supports that workflow and a set of physical behaviors, but privacy still depends on the applications users install on its sensor-equipped hardware.

Microduck is scheduled to ship before Christmas. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue describes it as an open-source robot that developers can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning. Its SDK, simulation environment and full training stack are available on GitHub.

The product is a training loop, not just a robot

Pollen Robotics says developers can train behaviors in simulation and deploy them directly to Microduck. After that first deployment, they can fine-tune the robot, retrain it and redeploy it. The stated proposition is a repeatable development cycle that connects the simulator and the physical device.

A camera, lidar and motion sensors underpin the tricks

Microduck perceives its surroundings with a camera, lidar sensors and two inertial measurement units, or IMUs, which measure movement. Its listed behaviors span locomotion and simple manipulation rather than one fixed task.

Listed abilities

• Movement: waddle, crouch, recover after falling and roller skate.
• Handling: pick up objects with its beak weighing up to 800 grams.

Open source is not a privacy setting

Delangue has argued that robots running open-source models give users more auditability and control than black-box systems. But open source is not a data-handling guarantee: installed applications can access robot cameras and microphones and may send that data to external services, depending on how they are built. Application design, not the availability of code alone, sets that privacy boundary.

The next hardware product after Pollen Robotics

Microduck follows Hugging Face’s April 2025 acquisition of French startup Pollen Robotics, which was intended to build affordable, open-source AI hardware. The companies later launched Reachy Mini. They now sell a $499 Raspberry Pi-powered Reachy Mini and a $399 Reachy Mini Lite that runs from a Mac or PC.