Project
A 25cm, sub-800g one-eyed biped robot with 15 motors, camera, LiDAR, two IMUs and an articulated beak, sold at $399 with an open-source software stack.
At $399 the Microduck is small enough and cheap enough to break on purpose, which turns embodied-AI experiments into an expense-report purchase rather than a capital project, once you know when it ships.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Pollen Robotics wants $399 up front for a 9.8-inch biped it says arrives before Christmas 2026, which lets a lab budget a reinforcement-learning bench the way it budgets laptops, provided it accepts one supplier for spare parts.
Perspective Coverage
6 publishersReality
MicroDuck's 14 policies came out of roughly five days of serial single-GPU training in mjlab, with nine separate reward designs behind them and a VRAM ceiling that cut the env count to 2048 on rough terrain.
Reality
The stack for Pollen's 25cm bipedal duck is on GitHub now, first units are due before Christmas 2026, and the mechanical files are staying shut, so the purchase is a bet on the policy code rather than on the body.
Reality
The Information reports a price that works out to 86 times Hugging Face's revenue, which means what Nvidia bought is the host of three million open-weight models, and every pipeline that fetches at build time has a new upstream owner.
Reality