Hugging Face is selling a $399 robot duck with open-source software
SMRTR summary
A one-eyed, 25-centimeter-tall robot duck that sings in a voice uniquely its own may be the strangest thing to hit your holiday wish list this year.
Pollen Robotics, a French company owned by AI platform Hugging Face, has unveiled Microduck, a bipedal robot priced at $399 that walks, crouches, picks up socks with its beak, and can even roller skate with an optional accessory pack. Preorders opened this week, with deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK.
The software is fully open source, already posted to GitHub. The hardware is not, and Pollen is unusually blunt about that distinction.
What the robot lacks, by design, is any autonomous purpose. "Adding purpose and autonomy to the robot is something we are still working on, and we expect the community to pick up and contribute," said Santiago Pavon of Pollen Robotics.
All of this is unfolding amid reports that Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for roughly $12.9 billion. Nobody involved is talking about it.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to The Next Web.
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