Hugging Face’s $399 Microduck passes 10,000 orders as Chinese chip powers the robot

• Pollen Robotics lists Microduck at $399 before taxes and shipping, with a battery, USB-C cable and game controller included. ^[1]
• The robot runs on Rockchip’s RK3566, which handles control, sensor processing, connectivity and model inference. ^[2]
• Microduck is 25 centimeters tall, weighs about 800 grams and uses 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and two IMUs. ^[3]
• Pollen has not disclosed monthly production capacity. Its official policy still targets first deliveries before Christmas 2026, while independent coverage has reported longer waits for later orders. ^[4]

Pollen Robotics has sold more than 10,000 units of its $399 Microduck robot within days of launch, turning a small open-source robotics project into an early manufacturing test for Hugging Face’s hardware ambitions. The robot’s onboard computer is Rockchip’s RK3566, a Chinese chip that runs its control loop, sensors, connectivity and lightweight AI workloads. [5]

Pollen, a French subsidiary of Hugging Face, opened Microduck pre-orders on August 27. The company lists the robot at an introductory $399 price before taxes and shipping and says first deliveries are targeted before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the U.K. [1]

A developer platform in a duck-shaped body #

Microduck is designed less as a household assistant than as a physical reinforcement-learning platform. Pollen says it can walk, sit, stand, kick, pick up small objects with its articulated beak, roller-skate with an accessory and recover from some falls. The company says seven trained behaviors ship with the robot and can be retrained and published. [3]

The robot is 25 centimeters tall and weighs about 800 grams. Its hardware includes 15 motors, a camera, a small depth sensor, two inertial measurement units and a 50-hertz onboard policy loop. Pollen publishes the SDK, simulation environment and reinforcement-learning stack on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. [1]

A Pollen engineer writing in a robotics forum described the platform as a way to let more people train behaviors on a small biped. The engineer also said workloads such as language models, mapping and advanced object recognition would require external computing rather than running locally on the robot. [6]

Rockchip supplies the compute #

The Microduck runs on Rockchip’s RK3566, a Chinese system-on-chip originally aimed at consumer electronics and other AIoT products. Pollen’s public code repository identifies the processor and says it drives the 50-hertz control loop, fifteen servos, radios and camera. [7]

Rockchip told China Daily that its processor handles model inference, motion control, sensor processing, audio and video processing and connectivity in Microduck. Rockchip said the chip includes a neural-processing unit capable of 1 trillion operations per second. [2]

The published design points to a division of labor: Microduck executes compact, pre-trained control policies onboard, while more demanding AI workloads can run elsewhere. The available materials do not present the robot as a local platform for a general-purpose conversational model. [7]

Demand is ahead of disclosed supply #

The more than 10,000-unit sales figure, first reported by CNBC and repeated by other outlets, implies at least $3.99 million in gross order value at the introductory price. It is a pre-order figure, not a measure of completed shipments or recognized revenue. [5]

Pollen has not publicly stated how many robots it can produce per month, how many units were ready when pre-orders opened or what its total 2026 fulfillment capacity is. Its shipping policy says Microduck will ship from warehouses in France for European orders and the United States for North American orders, while the merchandise originates in China. [4]

Pollen’s official policy still lists first deliveries as targeted before Christmas 2026. A separate independent report said the store was quoting a four-to-six-month wait for new orders, creating a discrepancy that Pollen should clarify before buyers rely on the original delivery window. [8]

China Daily reported that Shenzhen-based Seeed Studio is involved in manufacturing, citing technology-media reports. The article did not provide a production volume or a direct statement from Pollen confirming the arrangement. [2]

Privacy features remain partly prospective #

Microduck includes a camera, and Pollen’s published software architecture describes camera and audio streaming through WebRTC. That document says remote sessions should require explicit consent, show an indicator while streaming and use encrypted WebRTC media. [9]

The architecture document is labeled a draft and describes the intended first shipped version. Pollen’s project roadmap separately lists privacy consent as a future milestone and says the streaming indicator remains a hardware question. Those documents therefore describe planned protections, not a complete independently verified privacy guarantee for consumer units. [9]

An independent review characterized Microduck as a developer-focused robot rather than a household assistant. Its practical use cases are training locomotion and other physical behaviors, experimenting with perception and control, and sharing policies—not chores, home monitoring or general household questions. [10]

Further sources #

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