Hugging Face Microduck Biped Robot Ships Over 10,000 Units, Targets Christmas Delivery

Hugging Face and its Pollen Robotics unit announced that the Microduck bipedal robot has surpassed 10,000 pre-orders and shipments are on track to arrive before Christmas 2026. The 25-centimeter robot is priced at just $399 and features 15 motors, a camera, and a LiDAR sensor. What sets Microduck apart is its fully open-source stack: the SDK, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning training pipeline are all released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing owners to inspect and retrain all seven pre-installed policies. The robot runs on a Rockchip RK3566 chip manufactured in China, highlighting the role of Chinese silicon in the consumer robotics supply chain. The launch dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for hobbyists and researchers wanting to experiment with physical AI, following the same open-source democratization pattern that made open-weight language models mainstream. Multiple competing personal robot products are also gaining traction in the emerging consumer robotics market. (Original source: AI Impact Hub / Hugging Face, September 2, 2026)