Hugging Face Unveils Microduck: A $399 Open-Source 25 cm Biped You Train with Reinforcement Learning

- Hugging Face just dropped Microduck — a 25 cm bipedal robot for $399 that you train with reinforcement learning like some kind of digital dog whisperer. Fifteen motors, LiDAR, camera, two IMUs, and an Apache-2.0 training stack you can retrain yourself. It walks, kicks, roller-skates, and picks itself up after falling over — which is more than most Bitcoin maxis manage after a 30% drawdown. The sim-to-real loop runs through MuJoCo with PPO, trains a usable gait in one to two hours on a CUDA GPU, and exports to ONNX with the observation normalizer baked in. No hand-converted checkpoints — Pollen Robotics learned that lesson so you don't have to. The software is open-source; the mechanical and electronic design files are not. Aggressive passive income for the robotics crowd. Where's my cut? Deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026, assuming the relay window holds and nobody rebrands this as a DAO-governed companion bot at a 10x markup.