ToolsAugust 29, 2026via MarkTechPost
Hugging Face Unveils Microduck: A $399 Open-Source 25 cm Biped You Train with Reinforcement Learning
Why it matters
Hugging Face is democratizing embodied AI with a consumer-priced robot platform that ships with full sim-to-real training infrastructure — making reinforcement learning on real hardware accessible to practitioners and researchers outside labs.
Key signals
- Microduck: 25cm bipedal robot, $399 pre-order price
- 15 motors, camera, LiDAR, dual IMUs
- Full training stack: MuJoCo simulation, ONNX export, Apache 2.0 license
- Sim-to-real reinforcement learning loop on consumer hardware
- Built by Pollen Robotics (Bordeaux team within Hugging Face)
- Open-source, retrainable policies
- Microduck: 25 cm bipedal robot at $399
- Neural policies trained in MuJoCo, exported to ONNX
- Apache-2.0 training stack; end-user retrainable
- Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face Bordeaux team)
- Sim-to-real loop accessible to individual practitioners and researchers
The hook
$399. That's what Hugging Face just priced an open-source biped robot that you train yourself with RL.
Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux robotics team at Hugging Face, opened pre-orders for Microduck — a 25 cm bipedal robot where every movement is a neural policy trained in MuJoCo and exported to ONNX. At $399, it puts the full sim-to-real loop on a desk: 15 motors, camera, LiDAR, two IMUs, and an Apache…