Microduck

Microduck is a 25 cm, roughly 800 g open-source biped robot from Pollen Robotics, part of Hugging Face. The GitHub repository holds the robot's software: daemons running on a Rockchip RK3566 that drive fifteen servos from neural policies at 50 Hz. Pollen's site says pre-orders open August 27, 2026.

What It Is

Microduck is a hardware-plus-software robotics platform for AI builders and makers. The repository contains the on-robot software, written in Rust. It covers the control loop and motor bus, radios, camera, depth sensor, gamepad input and a signed update system with rollback. Policies are trained separately in the microduck_rl project using MuJoCo and PPO, then exported to ONNX for the robot to load.

How the Training Workflow Works

The site describes a four-step loop: train behaviours in physics simulation (locally or on Hugging Face Jobs), deploy to the robot, refine the simulation, and publish the policy for the community. A browser-based simulator twin is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. Documented behaviours include walking with a velocity-tracking gait, sitting and standing, kicking, grabbing with the beak, roller skating with skates fitted, and getting back up after a fall.

Software Architecture and Control

Separate daemons handle control (robotd), updates (updaterd), wifi and identity (configd), Bluetooth (btd), gamepad (padd), WebRTC camera streaming (mediad) and the depth sensor (tofd). They communicate over a single JSON-RPC contract on Unix sockets. Owners can manage the robot with the robotctl command-line tool, a gamepad, or duckctl over Bluetooth. A simulated duck can run the real daemons against a MuJoCo body.

Hardware and Availability

The robot has 15 motors, a camera plus LiDAR and two IMUs, and ships with a battery, USB-C cable and game controller. Optional charger, dev and accessory packs add batteries, spare parts and play gear. The software stack is licensed under Apache-2.0.