My Star Wars knowledge is, well, non-existent. Then I saw Microduck, a box-headed robot with one giant eye, and wondered what reference I was missing. Any fan could identify the robot’s fictional cousin in seconds, while I’d risk becoming your group-chat meme.
Pollen, the Bordeaux team that now works as Hugging Face’s robotics arm, is taking preorders in North America and Europe. The pitch is that teaching a robot new tricks should feel as easy as running an AI model, where you start with a gamepad and end up training your own behaviors in simulation. The catch is the queue. Demand has already pushed new orders into next year.
Pollen Robotics started taking Microduck orders on August 27, 2026, with Christmas deliveries on the cards. That was the plan, anyway. The store now warns that current preorders won’t ship until after April 2027 (and the $399 introductory price doesn’t include taxes or shipping).
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said at launch that one Microduck (NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang showcased the product at GTC Berlin) was selling every four seconds, half a million dollars on day one, against a goal of more than 20,000 units. Good for Pollen. Because my hometown, Armenia, isn’t on the launch list, and the store only promises more countries “later.”
The launch video sells the personality hard. In a kid’s bedroom, the duck chases a laser dot, topples over and shoves itself back up, then snatches a toy in its beak before heading outside to square off against other ducks on a basketball court and coast through a skate park on clip-on rollers like it pays rent there.
15 motors pull that off in a body 25 cm tall, and seven trained moves come in the box with the gamepad. Nobody has to write a line of code to start playing, and I love that. Power comes from a removable NP-F550 camera battery good for around an hour, and an hour goes fast. Swapping is easy, and the $39 charger pack adds two spares.
My favorite detail came after launch. In a recent engineering post, Pollen’s Antoine Pirrone explained how the duck maps a room with one depth sensor that takes in just 64 distances at a time. Pick it up and move it, and it figures out it’s lost and finds itself again (on one recorded session, its stops ended a median 2.7 cm from the truth). Sharp, for a duck that sees less than a robot vacuum.
Pollen has opened Microduck‘s software to everyone, while keeping the mechanical and electronic designs to itself. I’m also left guessing about the camera, how far its LiDAR reaches, and what age it’s suitable for. Maybe my gut is right about kids loving it. I wouldn’t spend $399 on that hunch alone.