A backflip for Jensen Huang, and the 399 dollar Microduck robot nears twenty thousand pre-orders

On stage, the small robots stamped their feet and beeped, sat down, then collapsed as if falling asleep. One of them even performed a backflip at Jensen Huang's request.

Clem Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face, speaks of a “Jensen Huang keynote effect”. He says cumulative pre-orders should pass twenty thousand by the next day, and that Microduck could become the best-selling robot of 2026.

Not all of those orders were placed in a single day, AI Times points out: the figure adds up pre-orders received since August.

Microduck is an open-source biped robot, 25 cm tall and weighing 800 g, designed by Pollen Robotics, a Hugging Face subsidiary. Hugging Face itself was bought by Nvidia in September.

It costs 399 dollars, excluding tax and delivery. It can walk, sit, stand up, tap a small ball and pick up objects with its beak. If it falls, it gets back up on its own.