Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics open pre-orders for the $399 Microduck

Hugging Face Hugging Face has announced its latest robot, and it's a real quacker. Pollen Robotics (acquired by Hugging Face last year) said in a blog post that the excellently-named Microduck was imagined as a more action-oriented alternative to its Reachy Mini desktop robot. Standing at 25cm tall and weighing under 800g, Microduck is a biped robot with 15 motors, a built-in camera and a small LiDAR sensor. It also has two IMUs and an articulated beak that is able to pick up objects. Where the Reachy Mini was a stationary robot built around human-robot communication, with Microduck, Hugging Face has focused on mobility. According to its maker, the water bird-inspired bot's various motors, spread across its legs, head and neck, allow it to "walk, sit, crouch, get back up from many common falls, and even roller-skate." It's aimed at developers and robotics enthusiasts who want to experiment with how AI-powered robots move through the world and deal with obstacles or accidents. Key to this trial and error philosophy is Microduck's diminutive stature. A large humanoid robot taking lots of tumbles raises both safety and financial concerns, whereas Microduck can pick itself back up and doesn't hit the floor with a huge impact if something goes wrong (that is, provided you don't have ill-advised plans to turn it into a death-defying stunt duck). Hugging Face said it decided on the duck branding as it made the most sense given the robot's "proportions, beak and waddling gait." Like real ducks, Microduck can come in a number of different colors, which Hugging Face said makes a number of its robots standing together "look like a collection of different characters rather than identical machines." The company also said it learned internally using a number of the robots at the same time is unsurprisingly "about ten times more fun," and seemingly even managed to get them playing soccer together. The announcement post isn't too heavy on technical detail. But the main Microduck repository, which is available today, includes the SDK and robot software, with the Microduck RL containing reinforcement learning tools. You can control the robot with a gamepad or have it follow a laser dot right out of the box, and its pre-learned behaviors mean it reacts to its surroundings and various movement triggers without you needing to code it all in. More technically savvy developers can take advantage of the open-source nature of the software stack to go more in depth with the available movement and simulation options. Unlike the Reachy Mini (and exactly like actual ducks), the Microduck doesn't use words, but instead communicates through sound (there's a built-in microphone and speaker), and Hugging Face says each robot has its own "audio identity" that is permanent after setup. You're supposed to think of it as a living creature rather than a robot assistant. You can pre-order Microduck today for $399, with four colorways on offer: Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky. The robot has 32GB of storage and 1GB of onboard RAM, and supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The 2,600mAH battery should be good for around one hour of continuous runtime. Hugging Face says it aims to dispatch its first round of orders before Christmas in the US.