Microduck has a grasping beak, a waddling walk and a voice made of little creature noises rather than words. The small robots that joined Jensen Huang onstage at GTC Berlin on October 21 are Pollen Robotics’ $399 programmable bipeds, first offered for preorder on August 27. A game controller gets you moving, and an open software stack lets you go further than the built-in tricks.
This isn’t a last-minute Christmas present. The current preorder page estimates four to six months for new orders and no longer promises Christmas delivery. The price is $399 before taxes and shipping.
Price: $399 USD preorder, before taxes and shipping
Where to buy: Microduck at Pollen Robotics
A little character with moving parts
At about 10 inches tall, Microduck has 15 motors, an articulated beak and a removable camera-style battery. Its built-in movements include walking, sitting, crouching and getting back up from many common falls. The beak can grasp objects, turning that expressive face into something you can experiment with rather than just watch.
The base box includes the robot, a battery, a USB-C cable and the game controller. Roller-skating and laser-following demonstrations don’t mean those accessories are included: rollers and the laser pointer belong to a separate accessory pack.
A front camera, an 8-by-8 depth sensor and two motion sensors give the robot inputs for sensing its surroundings and movement. There’s a speaker and microphones, too, but Microduck isn’t presented as a talking household assistant. Each robot gets its own generated sound identity when it first starts up, then keeps that voice.
Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky are the four shell colors. Underneath, they’re the same robot. The removable NP-F550 battery is rated for roughly an hour, depending on use.
The controller is only the starting point
The open-source software covers robot control, simulation and reinforcement-learning tools. You can work on a behavior in a virtual environment, then transfer it to the physical duck. You can test movements in simulation before running them on the robot.
NVIDIA’s keynote account describes a demonstration that moved from a simulated course to cloud training, evaluation on RTX Spark and deployment to Microduck. Local training with the current reinforcement-learning tools requires a CUDA GPU; Hugging Face Jobs is the cloud alternative. That computing isn’t included in the $399 robot package. You can use the controller and built-in behaviors without setting up your own training workflow.
“Open-source” also needs a precise reading here. The software is open; the mechanical and electronic design files aren’t.
A tinkering project, not a young child’s toy
The duck shape makes Microduck look like something you’d put in a child’s toy box. Its current terms of sale describe a development and experimentation platform recommended for ages 16 and up, not a product designed, tested or sold as a children’s toy.
Price: $399 USD preorder, before taxes and shipping
Where to buy: Microduck at Pollen Robotics
For an adult or older teen interested in robotics, the controller offers a way to explore the movements before opening the code. The longer project is making the same hardware do something different, with a camera, sensors and moving beak already assembled. If you only want a finished toy that arrives for the holidays, the current ordering timeline and intended use point elsewhere.
