Pollen Robotics opens preorders for its $399 Microduck

Pollen Robotics opens preorders for its $399 Microduck

2 min read•Aug 29, 2026•
Elena Vasquez
Elena Vasquez

Pollen Robotics has opened preorders for its $399 Microduck, a one-eyed biped standing just under 10 inches tall, first reported by The Verge. The robot is available to preorder now in cream, graphite, lavender, and sky blue, and Pollen Robotics says it plans to start shipping the robot before Christmas 2026.

The Microduck is the second AI robot from Hugging Face’s Pollen Robotics. Video demonstrations show it picking up socks and markers, kicking around a ball, and zipping around on tiny rollerskates.

Those demonstrations cover both object handling and movement. Pollen Robotics says the Microduck can react to its surroundings and follow a laser pointer, while users can also control it with a game controller.

Like Hugging Face’s previous Reachy Mini, the Microduck’s software is open-source, so users can retrain the robot to do new tricks. On the hardware side, it runs on a Rockchip RK3566 processor and has a camera, motion sensors, LiDAR, and articulated legs, head, and neck.

The Microduck can sing, too. Pollen Robotics says it communicates through “weird little sounds, closer to a creature than an assistant.” Each Microduck gets its own audio identity the first time it wakes up, tied to that individual robot.

Pollen Robotics says that identity stays with the individual robot, so it keeps the same voice for life.

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”

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