Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics Launch Microduck, a $399 Open-Source Bipedal Robot

On August 27, Hugging Face co-founder Thom Wolf unveiled Microduck, an open-source bipedal robot developed in partnership with Pollen Robotics. Priced at $399, it opened for pre-orders the same day, with shipping expected before Christmas. According to HF, it is a reinforcement learning robot built to be "affordable and accessible" — notably, individuals can get a real robot for under $400 and train it themselves.

Confirmed

Microduck is a 25 cm tall open-source bipedal robot with 15 actuators and a range of sensors (camera, speaker, lidar, NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi)
It centers on a Sim2Real reinforcement learning workflow — train in simulation, run on the real robot — with training possible locally or remotely
Ships with 10+ ready-to-use policies out of the box; official demos include walking, grabbing objects, getting back up after falling, and even roller skating
Priced at $399 (some posts say around $400), shipping before Christmas 2026

Why it matters

Several people sharing the news (tomaarsen, mishig25, reachvb) see it as the first truly accessible open-source RL robot, bringing previously costly bipedal robotics research down to an individual-friendly price point
Combining open-source hardware with a Sim2Real training pipeline gives the community a low-cost real-robot platform for training custom skills and reproducing RL research

2026-08-27 ~ 2026-08-27 · 10 related posts

Primary sources

Open-source bipedal robot Microduck supports RL training for under $400 — Thom_Wolf · 2026-08-27 18:31 (UTC+08:00)
Pollen and Hugging Face launch Microduck, a $399 open-source biped robot you train yourself — tomaarsen · 2026-08-27 18:58 (UTC+08:00)
Hugging Face Unveils Microduck, a $399 Open-Source Robot You Can Train with RL — tomaarsen · 2026-08-27 19:09 (UTC+08:00)

Microduck: $399 open-source biped robot supports sim-to-real RL training — mishig25 · 2026-08-27
[source] Open-source bipedal robot Microduck supports RL training for under $400 — Thom_Wolf · 2026-08-27
Hugging Face Unveils Microduck: Accessible Open-Source Bipedal Robot — reach_vb · 2026-08-27
[source] Pollen and Hugging Face launch Microduck, a $399 open-source biped robot you train yourself — tomaarsen · 2026-08-27
[source] Hugging Face Unveils Microduck, a $399 Open-Source Robot You Can Train with RL — tomaarsen · 2026-08-27

5 near-duplicate retellings: Thom_Wolf · huggingface · Thom_Wolf · Thom_Wolf · Hesamation