Hugging Face's $399 robot duck took pre-orders every 5 seconds

The most talked-about robot of the week is 25 centimeters tall, costs $399 and roller-skates.

The product

Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm of Hugging Face, opened pre-orders for Microduck on August 27. The bipedal robot duck carries 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and an articulated beak that can pick things up. It walks, sits, crouches, recovers from falls on its own and roller-skates. It ships in four colorways, with deliveries planned before Christmas in North America, Europe and the UK.

A Pollen engineer wrote on Reddit that pre-orders were coming in at one robot every 5 seconds, beyond the company’s expectations.

Why an open source duck matters

The whole stack is open source, including the reinforcement learning pipeline: owners train a behavior in simulation and run it on the real robot. That inverts the current structure of physical AI, where training robot behaviors has been the province of a few large labs with expensive hardware.

Thousands of hobbyists doing reinforcement learning on real, cheap hardware resembles the moment open weights left the big AI labs, and the same dynamics could follow: shared behaviors, community benchmarks, fast iteration on top of a common platform.

The corporate backdrop

The timing has a twist. Nvidia is reportedly close to acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal that would put the open source duck, its platform and its community under the largest chipmaker in the world. Whether the open stack stays fully open under new ownership is the question the robotics community will be watching.