Pollen Robotics opened Microduck preorders at $399

Pollen Robotics put Microduck on preorder on August 27, 2026: a 25-centimeter biped with fifteen motors, a grasping beak, and a $399 introductory price before tax and shipping. The company's X account sold the same pitch in one line — train it in simulation, run it on the real robot, first deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026.

This is not a one-off Hugging Face sticker on someone else's toy. Pollen's live site presents the company as part of Hugging Face, and the training repo can hand a job to Hugging Face Jobs instead of a local GPU. Pollen's about page still tells the Bordeaux startup story through Reachy 2 in 2024 and does not recap that relationship, so "part of Hugging Face" is the current brand claim, not a dated deal memo.

What $399 actually lists

The store page is stricter than the launch film. Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky shells share one machine:

• 15 motors
• wide-angle camera, 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR, two IMUs
• microphones and a speaker
• NFC antennas in the head and the beak
• Rockchip RK3566 plus an AI accelerator, 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
• a removable NP-F550 pack, about an hour
• 25 cm tall, 780 g

The marketing page's "800 g" is the claimed pickup payload, not the robot's mass. In the box: the robot, one battery, a USB-C cable, and a gamepad. Add-ons are $39 for a dual charger and two batteries, $39 for rollers, a ball, a laser, and NFC extras, and $119 for a developer kit with spare motors, tags, a screwdriver, and Hugging Face credit.

Listed launch markets are the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea. Pollen calls $399 an introductory price. Ordering ten or more units goes through sales.

The stack is the product

pollen-robotics/microduck is the onboard runtime. The README describes a Rust workspace with no framework: robotd owns a 50 Hz loop over fifteen Dynamixel servos; other daemons cover signed, health-gated updates, config, Bluetooth, the gamepad, a WebRTC camera, and the depth sensor. Every client — app, console, pad, or script — hits the same JSON-RPC contract on Unix sockets. Policies land as ONNX.

Those policies are trained next door in pollen-robotics/microduck_rl: mjlab on MuJoCo Warp, PPO, BAM actuator models for XL330 servos, domain randomization, and optional backlash joints. Observation vectors share a 61-dimension layout so the runtime can hot-swap walk, recover, sit, grasp, and roller policies without changing the contract. The repo's own walking recipe is a CUDA job, on the order of one to two hours at 4,096 environments. No GPU? --hf-jobs sends the same train command to Hugging Face Jobs.

Pollen lists the software stack as Apache-2.0 on the product page and on the company footer. That is the project's license claim.

Shipped tricks, per the product page: walk, sit and stand, kick, grab, roller skating, get back up. It also claims seven trained moves in the box; the GitHub README adds a quack. Those clips are vendor demos. There is no independent sim-to-real study on this SKU, because the SKU is still a preorder.

What it is not

It is not Reachy Mini, Pollen's already-shipping companion robot. Microduck is a locomotion and manipulation trainer wearing a cartoon shell. It is also not a verified $399 challenge to larger research bipeds. An hour on a camcorder battery, 1 GB of RAM, and a training path that wants CUDA or a Hugging Face Jobs bill are the constraints the store is willing to print. "Before Christmas 2026" is a target, not a tracking number.

If you wanted a desk pet, the launch film already did that job. If you wanted a cheap, documented sim-to-real loop you can fork, the two GitHub repos are the reason the preorder is interesting.