Microduck: A 25 cm Biped You Can Retrain Yourself

Pollen Robotics' Microduck is a 25 cm, 800 g biped that ships with seven trained behaviors, a game controller, and a full reinforcement-learning stack you can run on your own machine. Pre-orders are open at $399 for the base robot.

Why it matters

The interesting part is not the duck shape. It is the workflow: train in MuJoCo, deploy with robotctl, refine the sim, publish the policy. Pollen put the SDK, simulation, and shipped policies on GitHub under Apache-2.0. Hugging Face Jobs is in the loop for training. That is a credible sim-to-real loop in a product you can actually buy, not a lab demo.

Key technical notes

• Hardware: 15 motors, camera, LiDAR, two IMUs, 50 Hz onboard policy loop.
• Out of the box: walk, sit/stand, kick, grab, roller skating (with skates), and get-back-up from flat on its back.
• Retrain path: simulation on your machine or Hugging Face Jobs, then deploy to the physical robot and share policies with the community.
• Ecosystem: optional dev pack (spare motors, NFC tags, HF credit), accessory pack, and charger pack.

For teams building agentic or embodied systems, Microduck is a useful reference point: open policies, open sim, and a price that makes experimentation feasible without a full lab budget.