Physical AI just got a feathery mascot. Microduck, a $399 open source robot from Hugging Face, ships before Christmas. The bot measures 25 centimeters. It waddles and crouches. Its beak hoists objects up to 800 grams. It roller skates, and it gets back up after falling.
Chief executive Clem Delangue calls it an open source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning, part of a broader push to democratize physical AI. Behaviors train in simulation and deploy straight to the bot, with an SDK, simulation, and full RL training stack on GitHub.
A camera, lidar, and two inertial measurement units give the bot its view of the world. It follows the Reachy Mini desktop robots that grew out of Hugging Face’s April 2025 purchase of Pollen Robotics, which sells the $499 Reachy Mini and a $399 Lite version.
The launch arrives as Hugging Face reportedly nears a $13B acquisition by Nvidia, its partner since 2023. Delangue argues open source robots protect privacy better than closed black boxes run by a few organizations.
