Pollen Robotics Sells Microduck for $399 With Open Software and Closed Hardware Files
Hardware / news
Pollen Robotics Sells Microduck for $399 With Open Software and Closed Hardware Files
The 25 cm biped runs about an hour on a camera battery and lifts roughly 100 grams; the Apache-2.0 repo is public, the mechanical and electronic designs are not.
Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux company owned by Hugging Face, is selling Microduck, a 25 cm biped that walks on reinforcement-learning policies, for $399 before taxes and shipping. The software is Apache-2.0 on GitHub. The design files for the body and electronics are not, which makes the open-source label accurate for half the product.
What the $399 buys
The Microduck product page lists 15 motors, a height of 25 cm, a weight of 800 g, a camera, LiDAR and two inertial sensors, with a 50 Hz onboard policy loop. The Next Web adds a Rockchip RK3566 with 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, and an 8x8 time-of-flight matrix as the depth sensor.
| Pack | Price | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| Robot | $399 | Robot, battery, USB-C cable, game controller |
| Charger pack | $39 | Dual charger, 2 batteries |
| Accessory pack | $39 | Laser pointer, NFC tags, 2 rollers, ball |
| Dev pack | $119 | 3 spare motors, 2 batteries, charger, Hugging Face credit |
The page gives no battery runtime or ship date. It is also inconsistent on ordering: a banner says pre-orders open Aug. 27, 2026 while the footer says they are open now. The Next Web reports a removable NP-F550 camera battery of 2,600 mAh, good for about an hour, and a delivery target of before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK.
What is open and what is not
The pollen-robotics/microduck repository is Rust, split into daemons for the control loop, signed updates with rollback, camera, Bluetooth and gamepad, talking over JSON-RPC on Unix sockets. Walking policies are trained in a separate repo with MuJoCo and PPO and exported to ONNX. When read, it showed 11,600 stars and 1,392 commits.
The Next Web reports that Pollen's press kit asks reporters not to call the robot open-source hardware, and that a representative told The Register there are no plans to open the mechanical and electronic designs. A buyer can retrain and modify the behaviour; a buyer cannot make a compatible leg.
Limits Pollen states itself
The robot is a testbed for reinforcement-learning work, not a household helper. Santiago Pavon of Pollen Robotics put lifting capacity at roughly 100 grams, per The Next Web, and said autonomy is still being worked on, with voice recognition, navigation, grasping and SLAM left to the community. Pollen also marks camera resolution, LiDAR range and SDK languages as provisional.
The company has a track record to read against. The Next Web reports that Reachy Mini, sold at $499 for the Raspberry Pi version and $399 for the Lite, has sold more than 10,000 units since its 2025 launch. Hugging Face bought Pollen in April 2025. The same outlet relays a report that Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion; The Next Web says neither company has commented publicly on what that means for Pollen, and the deal is unconfirmed here.
Cheap machines like this sit at the opposite end of the scale from the factory humanoids covered in Tesla's Optimus production start at Fremont and Generative Bionics' data factory, where the question is units per month, not units per household.
What would change this read is the first batch of shipped units: a measured runtime on the 2,600 mAh battery and a delivery date that holds.
Sources
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