Hugging Face Is Selling a $399 Open Source Duck Robot

Hugging Face has unveiled the Microduck, a duck-shaped robot selling for $399 and shipping before Christmas.

Chief executive Clem Delangue called it an "open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The 25cm machine can waddle, pick up objects weighing as much as 800g with its beak, right itself after falling, crouch, and roller skate.

"Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models!" Delangue said.

How a model-hosting company ended up making robots

Hugging Face is best known as the platform where developers publish open model weights. It acquired the French startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025 to build affordable open-source AI hardware, and the two launched Reachy Mini a couple of months later. The line now includes the $499 Reachy Mini, built on a Raspberry Pi, and the $399 Reachy Mini Lite, which runs off a Mac or PC.

The Microduck perceives its surroundings with a camera, lidar and two inertial measurement units.

Why the price is the specification

Robotics research has been gated by hardware cost: a platform capable of real reinforcement learning experiments has generally started in the thousands, restricting the work to funded labs.

A $399 machine with lidar and a documented open design moves that into the range of a university course or an individual researcher. The duck is charming, and the charm is doing marketing work — but the interesting number is the one on the price tag.