Pollen Robotics’ Microduck aims to make training physical AI far less fragile and cheaper

Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face are back with another robot, and this one is delightfully unhinged. Microduck is a 25cm tall waddling biped built to take AI off your screen and onto your desk. Preorders open today, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026.

Unlike its predecessor, the Reachy Mini, Microduck is built entirely around action. It runs on 15 motors, with an articulated beak for picking up objects, a camera, a depth sensor, two IMUs, and enough balance to walk, crouch, and even roller-skate.

Built to take a tumble

Training movement models in the real world usually means expensive hardware and long repair bills when things go wrong. Microduck flips that dynamic. Measuring roughly 10 inches by 5.5 inches and weighing less than two pounds, it is tiny enough that a fall ends in a mild thud rather than a costly disaster.

What’s even better is that it picks itself back up after most falls, so you won’t have to babysit it while testing new behaviours. Pollen Robotics says its duck-like aesthetic and waddling gait weren’t something the company planned. They emerged naturally from its proportions, and the company just went along with it.

Despite its toy-like appearance, Microduck isn’t exactly targeted at kids. It’s aimed at developers who want to train their own physical behaviours, serving as an approachable testbed for sim-to-real machine learning.

More than just a desk toy

Out of the box, Microduck supports gamepad controls, laser-following, and seven trained moves, and each unit generates its own voice the first time it wakes up. On the surface, that makes it look more like a desk toy than a dev kit. However, the stack underneath is aimed at developers training their own behaviors.

Pollen Robotics has published the SDK, the robot software, and its reinforcement learning and sim-to-real tools on GitHub. The goal here is to keep physical hardware development as collaborative as open-source software, making it easier for developers to share trained neural network models, training recipes, and custom environments the same way they share language models.

Microduck comes in four colors, Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky, and is available for pre-order starting today at $399 before taxes and shipping. If you want to jump straight into training without waiting for hardware, Pollen Robotics has also published an interactive browser-based simulator to start testing code right away.