Microduck: a little robot that learns to walk by itself

Microduck is a 25-centimetre, two-legged robot that looks like a duck, and you train it yourself with reinforcement learning. It's made by Pollen Robotics, which has been part of Hugging Face since 2025. I think I'm really going to order one.

Just to be clear: I'm not an affiliate and I get nothing for this, not even a free duck. I just think it's a great gadget.

What Microduck can do

According to TechCrunch, it waddles around, picks things up with its beak, gets back up when it falls and can even roller skate. Its 800 grams hold 15 motors, a camera, a LiDAR and two motion sensors.

You teach it new behaviour in a simulation, on your own computer or through Hugging Face. Then you move it to the robot, where it runs 50 times per second. The software, the simulation and the whole training stack are open source. It costs 399 dollars before taxes and shipping, and should ship before Christmas.

Machine learning in a toy

What I find most interesting is that machine learning is now efficient enough to run on a toy robot. A little duck on your desk, keeping its balance with a model you trained yourself.

It reminds me of the Lunch Buddies, Lunch Garden's robots from 2019. Bob Alles-Op, Elly Eetgraag and Pol Buikje-Vol had to get children to eat their vegetables. The robot saw whether the plate was empty, and then you got a present. They stood in three restaurants for a while.

I worked on the technical reverse engineering of the robots, the machine learning that recognised the plates and the interactions on the screen. That took a lot more than a 399-dollar duck.