$399. About the price of a games console
Hugging Face opened pre-orders this week for Microduck: a 25cm open-source robot duck, shipping before Christmas, carrying a camera, lidar and two IMUs. It is built by Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired in April 2025.
The line worth noticing isn't the price. It's this one: the SDK, the simulator and the full reinforcement learning training stack are all on GitHub.
Which means you can teach it to walk inside a simulation on your computer, then deploy that onto the real thing and keep tuning it in the physical world.
That loop, train in simulation, push to hardware, retrain, was a university lab activity a few years ago. This year it is a Christmas present.
What interests me is that none of it is "writing code that tells it how to walk".
You define what good looks like. You let it try a few thousand times. You penalise falling over and reward moving forward. And it finds its own way there.
What interests me is that none of it is "writing code that tells it how to walk".
That is a different thing from the coding taught in schools. Coding is having the answer in your head and writing it down. This is not having the answer at all, your job is to be clear about what "good" means, and then to sit still while it fails in front of you, repeatedly.
Which, honestly, is closer to raising a child.
If a duck does walk into this house at Christmas, I suspect my son will be training it before I've finished the manual.
And the thing I'd want him to take from it isn't how to assemble a duck. It's whether he can hold his nerve long enough to let it fall over a thousand times.
