At Nvidia‘s GTC Berlin conference, a video of CEO Jensen Huang playing with a flock of waddling Microduck robots went viral. The robots stomp their feet, make tiny R2-D2-like noises, and follow voice commands to sit, fall down for a ‘nap,’ or summersault. Their appeal quickly translated into sales: preorders surpassed 20,000 units by the next day, according to Hugging Face‘s Clem Delangue. With delivery expected before Christmas, Delangue thinks they could become the best-selling robot of the year, and possibly not even for kids; promotional videos show adults playing with them too.

Microducks are open-source devices produced by Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired in 2025. Since the GPU giant Nvidia bought Hugging Face in September, the robots now sit under Nvidia ownership. They are Hugging Face‘s second robot after the Reachy Mini. The tricks they ship with were trained using Nvidia‘s technology stack, with the basics learned in simulation; owners can train new tricks and share them with the community.

The article offers the Microduck demo as a palate cleanser after a week in which AI involvement was blamed for a series of cyberattacks.