NVIDIA GTC

What happened on stage

Huang greeted the four robots, asked them to sit, then to stand. He requested a nap; three promptly tipped onto the floor while the fourth walked a few more steps before falling onto its side. The audience laughed. Huang laughed, encouraged them — 'Pay attention. Stay focused. Come here.' — and the robots recovered, attempted somersaults with mixed success, and one wandered off, tripped, righted itself and came back to sit in front of him.

Every account of the evening agrees on the same detail: the stumbles were the demo. A flawless routine would have shown choreography. Recovery showed learning — the visible signature of policies trained to negotiate with reality rather than replay a recording of it.

What Huang was actually announcing

The Microducks were the living footnote to NVIDIA's robotics stack: behaviours trained in the cloud on large NVIDIA systems, practised in Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, and evaluated through an Omniverse digital twin running on an RTX Spark machine before being transferred to real hardware. The keynote's wider message — that Europe's tradition of precision engineering meets its moment in physical AI — had four small, waddling exhibits.

Huang made the training lineage explicit: these robots were prepared by AI agents, cloud computing and simulation tooling, the same Isaac platform offered to every robotics company in the room. The ducks were not a break from the keynote's subject. They were its summary.

Why it landed

Datacenter hardware is abstract even to the people who buy it. A ten-inch robot looking up at a CEO, misunderstanding 'nap', and recovering with dignity is not abstract at all. Press coverage the next day led with the robots; the phrase of the night belonged to a machine that had, minutes earlier, been lying on its side.

There is a lesson the industry keeps relearning: the demo that teaches is the one with stakes. Four robots risked failure in front of the world's most technical audience, and their recovery explained reinforcement learning better than forty slides.

From that stage to your desk

The robots on stage and the robot in this store are the same platform: same fifteen motors, same sensors, same training lineage, in Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky. The first $399 batch sold out before deliveries, with shipments by Christmas in North America and Europe. Keynotes end. Queues form. This store is where the second part happens.

Microduck, in detail

To understand anything on this page, it helps to hold the whole robot in mind at once. Microduck is a bipedal AI robot approximately ten inches tall and under two pounds in weight, built by Pollen Robotics with Hugging Face. Fifteen motors are distributed across its legs, neck and head. A front camera and a depth sensor give it a view of the world with distance attached; two inertial measurement units report acceleration and rotation so its balance policies always know which way is up; and an articulated beak — a two-finger gripper in a friendly disguise — lets it pick up light objects from the ground. It walks, sits, stands, crouches, rolls, recovers from falls, and, with snap-on wheels, roller-skates.

None of those behaviours were hand-animated. They are learned policies: trained in the cloud on large NVIDIA systems, practised by thousands of virtual copies in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, and refined inside an Omniverse digital twin running on an RTX Spark machine before being transferred to real hardware. That is why the robot negotiates with a carpet edge instead of replaying a recording, why a somersault survives a different floor, and why the four Microducks at GTC Berlin could fall over in front of Jensen Huang and simply get back up. Learned skills improve, too — gait, recovery and beak control all sharpen through software updates after the robot is already yours.

The platform is deliberately open at the edges. The Developer Expansion Kit adds servos, sensor headers and beak attachments for owners who want to train their own behaviours through the same simulate, twin, transfer ladder that produced the factory skills. The Roller-Skate Wheel Kit turns walking policies into skating ones. The Charging Dock gives the robot a home; spare batteries give its demos a second act. Every accessory exists because the base robot was designed as a platform first and a product second — a distinction you can hear in the way it walks.

How buying from this store works

Ordering is intentionally ordinary, because novelty belongs in the robot, not the checkout. You choose a finish — Cream, Graphite, Lavender or Sky, all with identical hardware — add any accessories, and check out with an address and payment method. The price you see confirmed is the price you pay; totals are recomputed on our servers from the live catalogue, so a tampered or stale price can never become your invoice. Confirmation arrives on screen and by email with an order number, your batch, and your place in the shipping queue, which is set by order time and shared fairly across finishes.

Robot sales run in production batches, and the current batch is scheduled to arrive by Christmas in North America and Europe. We email you when your robot enters final assembly, again when it leaves with tracking, and again at delivery. Until the moment it ships, any order — robot, accessory or both — can be cancelled for a full refund to the original payment method, without fees, forms or retention conversations. After delivery, the 30-day promise takes over: live with the robot, introduce it to your floor and your family, and return it within thirty days for a full refund if it is not for you. Behind both promises stands a one-year warranty covering all fifteen motors, the camera, depth sensor, both IMUs and the beak mechanism, with prepaid return shipping for warranty claims in launch regions.

Support is staffed by people who do rotations through the very tickets they later write pages about, which is why the pages in this footer read the way they do. If anything in your order, delivery or robot's behaviour is unclear, the fastest route is always the same: sign in, open Your Orders, and start from the order itself, so your details travel with your question. Response target is one business day, faster in delivery windows, and every ticket can be escalated to a senior human by replying with a single word.

Getting the most from your Microduck

Microduck rewards a little stagecraft. It walks best on flat indoor surfaces — wood, tile, short carpet — where its depth sensor and IMUs can read the world cleanly, and it performs best for an audience that has been warned a somersault is coming. Keep the beak's playground honest: light objects, gripped gently, lifted proudly. Charge it on its dock if you have one, or by USB-C if you do not, and expect roughly two hours from empty to ready. When a software update arrives, take it: learned behaviours genuinely improve, and the robot that fumbled a recovery in November may land it cleanly in December without a single new screw.

Care is mostly common sense wearing a lab coat. Dust the camera lens with something softer than your sleeve. Check the feet and beak tips after skating sessions or ambitious somersault practice. Keep it dry — the shape is a homage, not a rating — and store it sitting, the posture its joints rest in. If your household includes children, know that Microduck was designed to be approached: approachable is not the same as indestructible, and the difference is mostly a matter of not conducting experiments at the top of staircases. Curious cats, in our support data, reach an armed truce with the robot within about a week.

Finally, share what yours learns. This platform sits inside an unusually open ecosystem: example policies circulate, community duck-bots multiply, classrooms publish their gaits, and the distance between 'my robot does a trick' and 'my robot taught the internet a trick' is one good write-up. The pages in this footer exist for the formal side of ownership; the community exists for the joyful side. A robot this social should not spend its life as a solo act, and neither should its owner.

Our service commitments

Four commitments govern every page in this footer, and they are commitments rather than aspirations. First, honesty about time: batch windows, response targets and repair timelines are stated as estimates we are organised to meet, and when one moves, affected customers hear it from us before they hear it from a tracking page. Second, reversibility: unshipped orders cancel free, delivered robots return within thirty days, and gift-card value is never stranded by our paperwork. A store selling a machine that learns from its mistakes should be able to reverse its own.

Third, repairability over replacement theatre: warranty claims aim at working robots, not new-box ceremonies, and support will troubleshoot before it ships anything — because a surprising number of tragedies are a sleeping robot, a mid-update pause, or a carpet with ambitions. Fourth, data restraint: we collect what an order, an account and a support ticket genuinely require, we never sell personal data, and the robot's camera serves locomotion on the device rather than curiosity in a cloud. These commitments are repeated across the Privacy Policy, Sales Policy and Warranty in their formal forms; this page merely refuses to let them stay buried there.

If we ever miss one of these marks for you, the remedy is built into the system rather than appended to it: reply 'escalate' to any support thread and a senior human reads the whole history, not a summary of it. Small teams cannot hide behind process, which we consider a structural advantage. The robots apologise by getting back up. Where a store is concerned, we intend the same reflex.

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