DevOps / SRE / Platform · 27.08.2026, 16:34 UTC
This duck will teach you reinforcement learning — and pick up your socks
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | DevOps / SRE / Platform |
| Quelle | The New Stack ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 27.08.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
You could have a mechanical duck waddling through your home before Christmas.
Hugging Face‘s Pollen Robotics on Thursday opened pre-orders for the Microduck, a $399 (introductory) bipedal duck-adjacent robot that can walk, waddle, and use roller-skates(!), with a beak to pick up objects. And when it falls, it can get back up, too.
The company expects to make the first deliveries of the Microduck before Christmas. It’s available in North America and Europe.
Microduck is the follow-up to Reachy Mini, the desktop robot Hugging Face and Pollen launched last year, which was stationary and focused on interacting with humans. Pollen also still sells Reachy 2, a far larger and pricier humanoid aimed at research labs. Microduck, the team writes in its announcement, is meant to focus on action.
Credit: Pollen Robotics.
“How do you teach a robot to move? How do you train a behavior in simulation, transfer it to real hardware, see what went wrong, and try again? What changes when the robot can leave the desk, carry something, fall over, and recover? It is an ideal platform for developers who want to train physical behaviors, experiment with reinforcement learning, and test how AI moves from simulation into the real world,” the team writes.
Not just a toy
And indeed, Microduck is not just a 25cm-tall toy. It’s an open-source platform with an SDK, virtual training environment, and reinforcement learning scripts to help developers train the robot to perform new tasks. The code is Apache 2.0, though the hardware design files are licensed non-commercially, so nobody is building and …