Pollen Robotics opens orders for a $399 open-source biped

Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm Hugging Face acquired in 2025, opened preorders on 27 August 2026 for Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot at $399 before taxes and shipping. Deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026 to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and much of Europe.

The hardware is modest by design: 15 motors, a camera, a small lidar, two inertial measurement units, a microphone and a speaker, under 800 g in total, with a 2,600 mAh battery giving about an hour of use. It arrives with seven pre-trained behaviours and can walk, sit, crouch, recover from common falls, roller-skate, and pick up objects with an articulated beak.

The release that matters is the software. The SDK, the MuJoCo simulation environment and the full reinforcement-learning training stack are published on GitHub under Apache 2.0, which puts a complete sim-to-real loop for a legged robot at desk scale and desk price. Learning to walk on a physical biped has until now meant either a research budget or a simulator with no body at the end of it.

The robot itself has not shipped. What exists today is an order page and an open repository, which is the half that does not depend on a delivery date.