Hugging Face's $399 Microduck AI Robot Surpasses $2.6 Million in 24-Hour Orders
Hugging Face and its subsidiary Pollen Robotics launched Microduck, a $399 open-source AI robot, which generated over $2.6 million in orders within its first 24 hours. The high demand has already pushed delivery times for new orders back by four to six months. This successful launch highlights a growing consumer and developer interest in physical AI hardware beyond digital chatbots. By offering an affordable, programmable robot, Hugging Face is lowering the barrier to entry for robotics research and development. The Microduck features a camera, LiDAR, two motion sensors, 32GB of storage, and 1GB of RAM, with a battery life of about one hour. Developers can train behaviors in a simulator and deploy them to the physical robot as ONNX files.
## BACKGROUND
Hugging Face, primarily known as a platform for sharing machine learning models and datasets, acquired French robotics startup Pollen Robotics in 2023 to expand into physical AI. Open-source robotics projects aim to democratize hardware development by allowing users to modify, program, and share robotic behaviors freely.