Pollen Robotics opens pre-orders for Microduck, a 25 cm open-source biped you can retrain

Pollen Robotics, the French company behind the Reachy robots and part of Hugging Face, opened pre-orders on August 27 for Microduck, a small biped designed to be taught new skills by its owner. The robot stands 25 cm tall, weighs 800 grams, and the company describes it as open source down to its software stack.

Moves in the box, retraining on your desk

Microduck ships with seven trained behaviours, including a velocity-tracking walking gait, sitting down and standing back up, a kick that returns straight to walking, a grab move in which the robot dips its beak to the ground and scoops objects, roller-skating locomotion when the skates are fitted, and the ability to get back on its feet from lying on its back. The hardware includes 15 motors, a camera with LiDAR and two IMUs, and its onboard policy loop runs at 50 Hz.

Every behaviour is a policy the owner can retrain. Training happens in a physics simulation, either on the user's own machine or through Hugging Face Jobs; the resulting policy is deployed to the real robot and can then be refined, retrained and shared with the community.

Open source from the SDK to the training stack

The SDK, the simulation and the full reinforcement-learning training stack are published on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, so what the robot runs is what owners can read, fork and retrain. A command-line tool, robotctl, handles monitoring, configuration and updates over SSH. Pollen Robotics says the community gathers on Discord to show builds, swap policies and get help when a leg misbehaves.

Price and packs

The robot costs $399 at an introductory price before taxes and shipping, and ships in four colourways with a battery, a USB-C cable and a game controller. Three optional packs are offered: a charger pack with a dual charger and two batteries for $39, an accessory pack for $39 with a laser pointer, an NFC polaroid, two rollers, a ball and ten NFC tags, and a dev pack for $119 that adds three spare motors, five motor cables, two batteries, ten NFC tags, a Hugging Face credit, a screwdriver and a screw pack.