Name: Microduck
Brand: Pollen Robotics

A walking robot shaped like a duck has become the surprise hit of the AI hardware season. Preorders for Microduck, made by Hugging Face’s robotics arm Pollen Robotics, passed 20,000 units the day after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang showed a flock of them on stage, according to Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue. That turns a kit built for robotics learners into something closer to a holiday gadget.

The clip that did it is short. The ducks waddle, chirp like tiny droids, sit, flop over for a nap and somersault when Huang asks them to. What sold people is that the clip shows what buyers get out of the box: a robot that walks, carries small objects in its beak and gets back up on its own after a fall, controlled with a gamepad and no coding required.

The specs are modest in the right places. Microduck stands 25 centimetres tall, shorter than a wine bottle, and weighs under 800 grams. It has 15 motors, a camera, a small depth sensor, two motion sensors and a speaker for the odd little sounds it makes in place of words. Swap its feet for wheels and it roller-skates. It can also chase a laser dot across the floor.

Price is where it stands apart. The introductory $399, before taxes and shipping, sits far below the trainable humanoid kits from China and the US that cost from roughly $1,700 into the thousands, as New Atlas noted at launch. Those machines aim at chores. Microduck aims at the person who wants to learn how a robot learns to move, and who would rather watch a cheap duck fall over than a costly humanoid.

That learning loop is the real product. Every behaviour Microduck ships with was trained in a physics simulation and then moved to the real robot. Pollen has put the software kit, the simulator and the full reinforcement-learning stack on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence, so owners can retrain a walk, teach new tricks and share them. Nvidia used the demo to pitch its RTX Spark machines for exactly that job.

There are reasons to hold the applause. The 20,000 figure comes from one executive’s social media post, not from audited sales, and a preorder is not a delivery. This is a first-generation biped from a small French team, and the $399 is labelled introductory, so later buyers may pay more. A camera and microphone on a robot that roams your home also deserve scrutiny: open code lets developers check what the duck does with what it sees, but most buyers will never read it.

Availability is narrow too. Pollen targets North America, Europe and the UK, with no date for Asia, Latin America or other regions. The scale gap is clear from Pollen’s own numbers: its first robot, the talking desktop Reachy Mini, has shipped more than 10,000 units in total, half of what Microduck has gathered in preorders before shipping anything.

Ownership raises the stakes. Hugging Face bought Pollen Robotics last year, and TechCrunch reports that Nvidia bought Hugging Face in September, which makes the duck an Nvidia showcase as much as an open-source project.

First deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026 in four colours: Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky. Delangue has suggested Microduck could end up the best-selling robot of the year, and Pollen’s own promotional videos show adults playing with it as much as children.

If 20,000 ducks arrive on time, the year’s most popular robot will be one built to fall over and get up again, not to fold anyone’s laundry.

Tags: nvidia, Jensen Huang, Hugging Face, robotics, Microduck, Pollen Robotics