Microduck is a 25-centimeter robot duck from Hugging Face that costs $399, sold more than 15,000 units before a single one shipped, and turned into the most searched gadget of the week after Nvidia put it on stage in Berlin and WIRED trained one to feed a cat.
What Is Microduck?
Microduck is a small biped robot built by Pollen Robotics, the robotics team at Hugging Face, and designed in Bordeaux, France. It stands 25 centimeters tall, about 9.8 inches, and weighs 780 grams.
The important part is what Microduck is for. It is not a finished consumer gadget with a fixed set of tricks. It is a platform for learning physical AI, built for developers, students, and hobbyists who want to teach a robot new skills. The software stack is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Owners train new behaviors in simulation first, then transfer the learned policy onto the physical robot, a workflow the robotics world calls sim-to-real.
Pollen Robotics engineer Antoine Pirrone built a cheap do-it-yourself version called Open Duck Mini, and that project grew into the finished Microduck, unveiled in August 2026 with preorders at $399.
Microduck is Hugging Face’s second consumer robot. The first was Reachy Mini, a desktop robot focused on conversation and human interaction. Microduck shifts the emphasis to movement, manipulation, and learning physical skills. The week of November 10, 2026 gave the duck its biggest stage yet, when Nvidia’s Jensen Huang closed the company’s European tour with Microducks on stage at GTC Berlin, in the same week Nvidia released Isaac Lab 3.0, its open-source framework for training robots in simulation.
How Much Does Microduck Cost?
Microduck costs $399 at its introductory preorder price. That is the number Pollen Robotics opened preorders with in late August 2026, and it is the price still listed for new orders.
The $399 figure matters because of what it undercuts. Research robots with this kind of capability have traditionally cost thousands of dollars. Microduck’s price puts a reinforcement learning platform on a desk for less than a mid-range smartphone, and that price is a large part of why the search volume spiked.
There are no accessory prices published yet, and no subscription fee. The robot runs its software locally and does not require an internet connection, so there is no monthly charge to keep it working.
When Will Microduck Ship?
This is where the story gets complicated, and it is the question most buyers are actually searching for.
Pollen opened preorders in late August 2026 with a pre-Christmas delivery target. Demand blew past that plan fast. Business Insider reported that orders passed $2.6 million in the first 24 hours, citing Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. The checkout page soon moved new orders to a four-to-six-month window, and Gadget Flow reports the store now warns that current preorders will not ship until after April 2027.
Put the two dates together and the gap is stark. An early buyer who ordered in August waits about 4 months for a pre-Christmas duck. A buyer ordering today waits roughly 8 months, until after April 2027. That is about double the wait, and it is the clearest sign of how fast the first batch sold through. WIRED senior writer Will Knight, who trained a virtual Microduck in November 2026, is still waiting for his physical robot.
What Can Microduck Actually Do?
Out of the box, Microduck already knows a set of built-in behaviors. Its 15 degrees of freedom let it walk with a distinctive waddling gait, sit, crouch, recover from falls, and roller skate. The articulated beak picks up and carries small objects. Those built-in behaviors are a foundation for users to build on, not the finished product. The hardware is built for experimentation: a wide-angle camera, an 8 by 8 time-of-flight LiDAR sensor, two inertial measurement units, microphones, a speaker, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and dual NFC antennas.
Power comes from a removable 2,600 mAh NP-F550 camera battery, the same kind of battery used in many cameras, and it runs the robot for roughly an hour. Swapping batteries eliminates downtime between experiments.
There are honest limits, and the people closest to the project say so. Knight wrote that the vision system on his virtual duck does not work well enough to be deployed in a real product. When he fed the model a GIF of Michael Jackson to teach it the moonwalk, hours of effort produced what he calls a very jaunty backward jog.
How Do You Train a Microduck?
Training a Microduck is the whole point of the product, and the week of November 10, 2026 gave the public its clearest look at how it works.
WIRED’s Will Knight wanted a robot to feed his Bengal cat, Leona. His plan was a small walking robot that finds her, bows its head, and drops a treat from a compartment printed to sit on top of it. He trained a virtual Microduck to walk around a room without toppling over and to pick out the cat nearby, and he said the job took a few hours where it once might have taken him weeks.
Knight paired OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol model with Hermes, an agentic harness from Nous Research, running on an Nvidia DGX Spark desktop machine. Through Nvidia’s Isaac Sim, the model sent instructions to the simulated duck, watched video of the duck in action, judged how well things were going, and suggested changes to the training regime. Run, watch, tweak, repeat. That slow, unglamorous loop is the part of robot learning that got automated.
The method has a name now. ASPIRE is a framework whose authors include UC Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg and Nvidia’s Jim Fan. A large language model writes a robot’s control code, reads the execution traces when it fails, repairs the program, and files the working fix in a skill library that later tasks can reuse. Fan’s lab at Nvidia put the v1.0 code on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license in mid-October 2026. Running on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, ASPIRE reports 99 percent average success across all 80 LIBERO-Pro manipulation tasks, a self-reported figure that has not yet been independently reproduced.
For a Microduck owner, the practical version is simpler. You train a behavior in simulation, where thousands or even millions of failed attempts cost nothing and leave the robot unbanged. You load the finished policy onto the duck, watch what it does, adjust the simulation, and refine. The full software stack is scheduled to be released on GitHub before the first robots begin shipping ahead of Christmas 2026.
The Numbers: What 15,000 Sales and a $2.6 Million First Day Actually Mean
Here is the original math behind the Microduck story, compiled from the verified figures in this article.
Quotable summary: Microduck sold about 6,500 units in its first 24 hours, roughly 43 percent of all the units it has sold to date, at $399 each.
The first-day number comes from the $2.6 million in orders Business Insider reported for the first 24 hours. Divide $2,600,000 by the $399 preorder price and you get about 6,516 units. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says the duck has now sold more than 15,000 units around the world. That means about 43.4 percent of every Microduck sold so far moved in the first day. The launch did not build slowly. It spiked, then kept selling.
Multiply the 15,000-plus units by $399 and the implied gross preorder revenue is at least $5,985,000, just under $6 million, before tax and shipping, for a robot that had not shipped a single unit when the number was reported.
The shipping math tells the other half of the story. Early orders targeted delivery before Christmas 2026, about 4 months after the late-August preorder opening. New orders are now warned they will not ship until after April 2027, roughly 8 months after the preorder opening. The wait for a new buyer is about double the wait for an early buyer.
The development pace is just as fast. The Microduck project logged 267 software commits in the last month, about 9 a day, and the November 11 daemon release added a quack-on-command feature. A product that can add a new behavior in a software update is a different kind of gadget from a toy with fixed tricks.
Microduck vs Reachy Mini vs WonderDuck vs XGO-Duck
Microduck is not the only small robot fighting for desk space this year. Here is how the field compares.
Microduck costs $399, stands 25 centimeters tall, weighs 780 grams, and has 15 degrees of freedom. It walks, waddles, sits, crouches, recovers from falls, and roller skates. Its beak works as a gripper. Its software is open source under Apache 2.0, while its hardware designs are not open source. It is built for movement and learning physical skills.
Reachy Mini, Hugging Face’s first consumer robot, costs $299 in its Lite version and $449 in its Wireless version. It stands 28 centimeters tall and weighs about 1.5 kilograms. It has a 6-degree-of-freedom head, four microphones, a speaker, and a wide-angle camera, and it is built for conversation and human interaction. It launched in July 2025, has sold about 10,000 units, and its app store now holds more than 200 apps from more than 150 creators.
The price math is close. Microduck costs $100 more than the Reachy Mini Lite, about 33.4 percent more, and $50 less than the Reachy Mini Wireless, about 11.1 percent less. Microduck is 3 centimeters shorter than Reachy Mini, about 10.7 percent shorter, and 720 grams lighter, about 48 percent lighter. The choice between them is really a choice between talking and walking: Reachy Mini listens and chats, Microduck moves and learns to move.
WonderDuck is the newest rival. Shenzhen-based Hiwonder showed it in a clip posted November 9, 2026, a little yellow biped waddling across the floor while carrying a cloth in its beak. Hiwonder says WonderDuck covers the same path, from simulation training to policy deployment on the real duck, and its bigger claim is that the hardware structure, running code, and training projects are all open. That would go further than Microduck, which opens its software but keeps its hardware designs closed. Hiwonder has not shared specs, a price, or a release date yet.
XGO-Duck is the open-source answer from Luwu Dynamics, a 3D-printable biped adapted from Microduck, built on the Arduino UNO Q. A clip of it lining up and kicking a small ball became one of the top posts on r/arduino over the weekend of October 31 to November 1, 2026, and Circuit Digest covered it on November 2. Luwu sells a self-assembly electronics kit at CNY 2,328 against a list price of CNY 2,828, a saving of CNY 500, or about 17.7 percent. There is no UK retailer, no Amazon UK listing, and no UK price as of November 2, 2026.
The pattern is clear. One robot duck from Hugging Face has already spawned a printable clone and a Chinese rival within three months of its unveiling. The robot duck is fast becoming the starter kit for physical AI.
Is Microduck Worth Buying?
I have not had a Microduck on my desk yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. No physical units have shipped to buyers at the time of writing, so nobody outside Pollen’s team has tested one in a real living room. What I can say as someone who has spent 27 years photographing products and people is that the duck photographs like a hit: 25 centimeters of yellow personality that waddles, wears roller skates, and picks things up with its beak is built to be shared.
The honest answer depends on who you are. If you are a developer, a student, or a hobbyist who wants to learn reinforcement learning on real hardware, Microduck is the cheapest serious way in, and the open software stack plus the sim-to-real workflow is exactly what you want. If you want a finished robot that entertains the kids on Christmas morning, wait. The first units are aimed at people who enjoy training a robot, not people who want one that already knows everything. The vision limits Knight ran into are real, and a duck that moonwalks into a jaunty backward jog is charming in a demo and frustrating in a living room.
Where to Buy Microduck
Microduck is sold through Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face’s own store, where preorders opened at $399 in late August 2026. There is no Amazon listing, no retail shelf, and no third-party seller to check. The only place to order is direct from the maker, and the store’s current warning is the number to trust: new preorders will not ship until after April 2027.
If you are buying a gift rather than a gadget for yourself, and you need something that arrives before Christmas, check our guide to what to buy for the person who has everything this Christmas and our best luxury Christmas gifts for travelers. Both are built around presents that actually ship in December, which is more than Microduck can promise right now.
For gift buyers shopping in the same price range, the $399 Microduck sits next to classic luxury gifts rather than toy robots. Our ranking of the 12 best luxury watches for men shows what $399 buys in a more traditional gift, and it is a useful comparison when you are deciding between a gadget and something timeless.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Microduck cost?
Microduck costs $399 at its introductory preorder price. That price has held since preorders opened in late August 2026. There is no subscription fee, and the robot runs locally without an internet connection.
When will my Microduck ship?
Early preorders targeted delivery before Christmas 2026. New preorders placed now are warned they will not ship until after April 2027, with the checkout page showing a four-to-six-month window.
What is Microduck used for?
Microduck is a platform for learning physical AI. Owners train new behaviors in simulation using reinforcement learning, then transfer the learned policy to the physical robot. It is built for developers, students, and hobbyists, not as a finished consumer toy.
How big is Microduck?
Microduck stands 25 centimeters tall, about 9.8 inches, and weighs 780 grams. It has 15 degrees of freedom, a wide-angle camera, an 8 by 8 time-of-flight LiDAR sensor, two inertial measurement units, microphones, a speaker, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and dual NFC antennas.
How long does the Microduck battery last?
The removable 2,600 mAh NP-F550 camera battery powers Microduck for roughly an hour. Because the battery is removable and swappable, owners can keep spare batteries charged and eliminate downtime between experiments.
What is the difference between Microduck and Reachy Mini?
Reachy Mini is Hugging Face’s first consumer robot, focused on conversation and human interaction, priced at $299 for the Lite version and $449 for the Wireless version. Microduck is the second, focused on movement, manipulation, and learning physical skills, priced at $399. Reachy Mini talks. Microduck walks.
Sources checked for this article: Hackster, Microduck launch coverage, August 27, 2026, updated November 13, 2026; Martin Cid Magazine, WIRED’s Will Knight virtual Microduck training feature, November 12, 2026; Interesting Engineering, WonderDuck vs Microduck, November 10, 2026; Joao Goncalves, the first mass-market robot is a duck, October 23, 2026, updated November 13, 2026; GitTrending, Microduck daemon-v0.17.8 release review, November 11, 2026; Aitoys, XGO-Duck open-source robot duck, November 2, 2026; RECIWO Labs, Reachy Mini benchmark, October 26, 2026; ui44, Reachy Mini specifications and pricing; Boomspot, Hugging Face Reachy Mini app store launch.
