Pollen ships Microduck's open software months before the $399 robot itself

The first thing a team does with a robot this cheap is buy more than one, and Pollen has pre-answered the question of what to do with it by saying Microduck is about ten times more fun in groups, with races and robots reacting to each other as the internal favourites ^[21].

The price supports that. Divide $399 by 15 motors and you get about $27 an actuator, and that $27 also has to carry the RK3566, the time-of-flight matrix, the two IMUs and the battery ^[23]. It works because nothing in the parts list is asked to lift anything: Santiago Pavon's figure of roughly 100 grams is about an eighth of the robot's own sub-800g mass ^[24], and TechCrunch had to correct its launch story after overstating what the beak could carry ^[18].

What the money does buy is a control loop running at 50Hz, a decision every 20 milliseconds ^[9][25], and a sim-to-real repository that is public now, so a skill trained in simulation can be pushed onto the machine when one arrives ^[11][12]. That is a locomotion policy bench with a camera on it.

The gap worth naming, before anyone writes the internal memo, sits between the pitch and the delivery. Teams will put voice recognition, navigation and SLAM on the slide as things the platform does. Pollen has written those same words down as things it hopes owners will do, and Pavon says adding purpose and autonomy is still being worked on and is expected to come from the community ^[20]. What is being pitched is a platform, but what will actually ship late next year is a walking, self-righting testbed with about an hour of runtime on a removable NP-F550 camera battery ^[5][10].

The chassis is where the rollout gets awkward. Pollen's press kit tells journalists that the open-source claim covers the software stack only, and asks reporters not to describe the machine as open-source hardware ^[13]; a representative told The Register the company has no plans to open the design files ^[14]. The split is deliberate policy rather than a paperwork oversight, and Pollen already runs the same approach on Reachy Mini, which it says has passed 10,000 units since launching last year ^[15]. In practice, a snapped hinge or a beak with different geometry is Pollen's decision to support, not something a buyer can print.

The purchase comes down to two questions: whether the experiment lives in the policy or in the body, and whether the calendar tolerates first deliveries before Christmas 2026 ^[4]. Policy work travels, because it is code in a public repository that outlives any one chassis ^[11]. Body work does not travel, because the files are shut ^[13]. For a patient buyer betting on policy, this is a bench worth several units; for someone in a hurry betting on the body, it is a toy with a good SDK, which is close to what The Register called it: a cheap way to teach hardware AI and modern robotics, not an in-home butler ^[19]. Clement Delangue's launch post drew 4.4 million views ^[16], and none of those views is a grasp test.