The robots that stole Nvidia's big European keynote this week were not humanoids or factory arms. They were four knee-high ducks. On Wednesday, 21 October, Jensen Huang shared the stage at GTC Berlin with a squad of Microducks, small two-legged robots made by the French company Pollen Robotics, and asked them to sit, stand, take a nap and do a somersault. Not all of them obeyed, which was half the charm. Here is who Pollen is, what Nvidia was really showing off, and what its robots cost in the UK.
Who are Pollen Robotics?
Pollen is a small Bordeaux company that builds friendly-looking, open-source robots for researchers and developers. In April 2025 it was bought by Hugging Face, which runs the world's most popular platform for sharing open AI models. The logic was simple: Hugging Face had millions of developers writing AI software, and Pollen gave them affordable bodies to run it on.
The story has since grown. On 2 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face itself for about $12.9bn (roughly £9.5bn): $11.9bn for shareholders plus up to $1bn in shares to keep staff. The deal needs regulators' approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027. If it does, Pollen and its ducks end up inside Nvidia, which has promised to keep Hugging Face open to other companies' chips.
What happened on stage in Berlin
Huang's keynote at Berlin's Tempodrom capped a European tour that also took in London, Paris, Stockholm and Dublin. Near the end, four Microducks walked out on their own and gathered in front of him. They sat and stood on command and beeped back when spoken to. Told to take a nap, one kept walking before toppling over with the others. Asked for a somersault, only two seemed to manage it. Huang laughed, coaxed them back up and carried on.
The wobbles did not spoil the point. Huang said the ducks had been trained in the cloud on Nvidia's big computers, practised in an Omniverse "digital twin" (a detailed simulation of the robot and its surroundings) and been checked on an RTX Spark PC before being loaded onto the real robots. He held the project up as proof that small teams can now build capable robots without a huge engineering department.
Why it matters
The hard part of robotics is teaching a body to move. Cheap motors make it harder, because every unit has its own friction, gear slack and delay, and the usual fix is costly test rigs or a fleet of robots.
Alongside the keynote, Nvidia and Pollen published a joint tutorial on Hugging Face showing a Microduck walking, turning and getting back up after being knocked over, using a policy trained entirely in simulation with Nvidia's open-source Isaac Lab 3.0. It ran 4,096 virtual ducks at once on a single graphics chip, deliberately varying weight, floor grip, battery voltage and gear slack, so the real robot's quirks looked like just another variation. The trained file went onto the robot with no hardware-specific tuning. The pair also launched Microduck Arena, a public leaderboard for walking policies. Put simply, a student with a £300 robot and some rented cloud time can now do work that used to need a lab budget, and that cloud time runs on Nvidia chips.
The robots: Microduck, Reachy Mini and Reachy 2
Microduck stands 25cm tall and weighs about 780g. It has 15 motors, a wide-angle camera, a small LiDAR sensor, two motion sensors, microphones, a speaker and a beak that can grab small objects. A Rockchip processor with an AI accelerator, 1GB of memory and 32GB of storage runs it, and a removable battery gives about an hour of play. It ships with seven trained moves, including walking, kicking, sitting and getting up, plus a game controller. All the software, including the training setup, is open source. It comes in cream, graphite, lavender or sky.
Reachy Mini is a 28cm desktop companion with a head that moves in six directions, a rotating body, two animated antennas, a camera, four microphones and a speaker. You program it in Python or JavaScript or install apps others have shared. The Lite version plugs into a Mac or PC by USB; the Wireless version has its own Raspberry Pi computer, battery and Wi-Fi. Both come as kits that take two to three hours to build, with no soldering. Pollen says more than 10,000 have shipped.
Reachy 2 is a human-sized, open-source humanoid for labs, with two seven-jointed arms that each lift about 3kg, adjustable height from 136cm to 166cm and an optional wheeled base. It is usually driven by a person in a VR headset to collect training data. It does not walk.
Where to buy and how much
Pollen sells through its own online store, which ships to the UK, the EU, the US and Canada. UK buyers are charged in euros. Prices are as listed on 23 October 2026, with pounds converted at the European Central Bank reference rate of 22 October (€1 = £0.84).
| Robot | US price | UK/EU store | Wait |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microduck | $399 | €340 (about £285) | 4–6 months for new orders |
| Reachy Mini Lite | $399 | €350 (about £293) | Up to 90 days |
| Reachy Mini Wireless | $499 | €435 (about £364) | Up to 90 days |
| Reachy 2 | From about $38,000 (reported) | By quote | Built to order |
The Microduck box holds the robot, a battery, a USB-C cable and the controller. Extras include a charger pack with two spare batteries (€33), an accessory pack with rollers, a ball and a laser pointer (€33) and a dev pack with spare motors and batteries (€99.99).
Two things to watch. Prices exclude shipping, and orders are sent "delivered at place", so any import VAT, duties or courier fees are yours to pay on arrival. As the robots ship from France, budget for 20% UK import VAT unless the checkout says otherwise, which would take a Microduck to roughly £340 before delivery. And demand is high: the store warns it can no longer promise Christmas delivery for new Microduck orders, and Reachy Mini has shown as sold out at times. Outside Pollen's shipping regions, distributor Seeed Studio sells Reachy Mini, and Reachy 2 goes through Pollen's sales team. We found no Pollen robots on Amazon UK, so the official store is the place to order.
Who are they for?
Microduck is the most fun out of the box and the one to pick if you are curious about how robots learn to walk: students, coders and older teenagers wanting to try reinforcement learning. Reachy Mini suits people building conversational AI or creative apps that need a face rather than legs. Neither is a toy for young children, and both reward time at a keyboard. Reachy 2 is strictly for labs with five-figure budgets.
What's next
The first Microducks are due to reach buyers before Christmas, with later orders following into spring. The tutorial hints at what comes after walking: using the head camera to find its way around, climbing ramps and handling objects. The bigger question is Nvidia's takeover of Hugging Face. If regulators approve it, Pollen's playful robots will become a showcase for how the world's most valuable chip company wants everyone to build robots. Berlin's wobbly ducks were an early, and rather endearing, preview.
Related: Humanoid robots in 2026: prices, availability and what they can really do · The best coding robots for kids in the UK.