Hugging Face Launches Microduck: A $399 Open-Source RL-Trained Biped Robot

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics have unveiled Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot priced at $399 that users train using reinforcement learning. The robot is fully open-source, covering both hardware designs and training code, making it accessible for researchers and hobbyists who want to experiment with physical AI without enterprise-level budgets. Microduck is positioned as an educational and research platform for RL-based locomotion, with Hugging Face's model hub infrastructure presumably backing model sharing and iteration. For developers interested in embodied AI, this dramatically lowers the entry point for hands-on RL experimentation with a physical agent. It also extends Hugging Face's open-source ecosystem into robotics, signaling the platform's ambitions beyond language and vision models.