Pollen Robotics has unveiled a bipedal robot called Microduck, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The Bordeaux company is owned by the AI platform Hugging Face. Its new machine has one eye and 15 motors, stands 25cm tall, and weighs under 800g. Preorders opened on Thursday. Pollen is targeting first deliveries before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK.
The robot walks, crouches, rights itself when it falls, and picks small objects up with its beak. Videos on the launch post show it collecting socks and a marker pen. An optional accessory pack adds wheeled feet so it can roller skate, along with a ball, an NFC chip and tags, and a laser pointer it follows with its camera.
Microduck runs on a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, a part number first reported by The Verge. It sees through a front camera and judges distance with a compact LiDAR, an 8×8 time-of-flight matrix. One inertial measurement unit sits in the body and a second in the head. A 50Hz policy loop connects the onboard model to those sensors and decides what the robot does next, The Register reported.
It runs on a removable NP-F550 camera battery, a 2600mAh cell common in video kit, giving around an hour of runtime.
