Hugging Face’s Microduck Feels Like a Harbinger of the Cute AI Robot Wave - CNET

摘要: Hugging Face’s Microduck Feels Like a Harbinger of the Cute AI Robot Wave

It waddles… it roller-skates… it plays ball… it learns.

Scott Stein

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Hugging Face’s Microduck Feels Like a Harbinger of the Cute AI Robot Wave

It waddles… it roller-skates… it plays ball… it learns.

Scott Stein

Editor at Large

I started with CNET reviewing laptops in 2009.…

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Scott Stein

Editor at Large

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August 27, 2026, 3:08 pm ET

1 min read

Microduck is an adorable robot. It's also an AI training tool in roboduck form.

Pollen Robotics

I hadn’t been paying a ton of attention to the robot beat lately, but an adorable waddling duck

caught my eye this morning and changed all that. The

Microduck

, a collab between hot AI tool hub Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics, can be yours for $399. I can’t stop thinking about it now.

It took me right back to my coverage of adorable toy robots in the 2010s. Sphero’s

programmable rolling balls

and Star Wars bots, or the Wall-E-like

Anki Cozmo

. The Microduck is Pollen’s second Hugging Face robot collaboration, the first being a sedentary robot called Reachy Mini.

The mobile Microduck looks like Disney’s waddling

Nvidia-powered BDX droids

crossed with

Untitled Goose Game

. It’s got little legs, a camera eye and a “beak” mouth/grabber that can pick things up and carry them around. It can skate around with wheels on its feet? There are IMU motion-tracking sensors and a depth sensor, too.

According to Pollen, it’ll work on its own as a robot toy. It can be controlled with a gamepad, responds to laser pointers and can explore environments. But emergent behaviors and AI training are part of the purpose for this existing in the first place. It’s a way to test AI and robotics in a little toy form.

Seriously, look at this thing.

Pollen Robotics

I used to love those promising little robot toys that Sphero and others made, because they were fun to experiment with, but emergent behavior wasn’t always possible then.

The Microduck will apparently have its own sounds, in its own voice, and can interact with other Microducks, each with its own voice. I’m

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