Hugging Face's robotics arm Pollen Robotics is taking orders for the Microduck, a $399 open-source duck robot that, per TechCrunch, developers can train at home out of the box.
This is Pollen's second cute AI robot since coming under Hugging Face, and the pattern is consistent with the rest of the company: cheap, open hardware aimed at putting a physical policy-training target on a developer's desk rather than in a lab. At $399 the Microduck is priced as a hobbyist toy, which is the point — the robot-learning bottleneck is data, and data needs units in the wild.
Sources: Pollen Robotics, TechCrunch, The Verge, HN discussion