Microduck›Legal›Sales Policy
Legal
Sales Policy
How buying from Microduck works: pricing, payment, pre-orders, cancellations, returns and errors.
This policy is the commercial contract in plain clothes: how prices are set and confirmed, when payment happens, how pre-order batches bind us and you, how cancellations and refunds flow, and what happens if the store makes a mistake. The Warranty and Shipping & Returns pages expand their corners; this page is the frame they hang in.
Our commercial philosophy fits one sentence: the price confirmed is the price paid, the queue position promised is the queue position kept, and until your order ships, changing your mind costs you nothing.
Pricing and payment
Prices are shown in the store's currency with taxes calculated at checkout according to your region; the total on the confirmation screen is the total charged. Payment is taken or authorised at order time through our payment providers; we never see or store full card numbers, and orders are confirmed by email with an order number that becomes the key to every later conversation.
Gift cards apply like cash at checkout, balances survive partial use, and card portions of any refund return to the card. Promotional prices apply to the orders placed while they run, not retroactively to yesterday's queue — early supporters are protected by batch position instead, which history suggests is the better currency.
Pre-orders and batches
Robot sales run in production batches. A pre-order reserves a unit and a queue position set by order time, identical across finishes. We publish the expected delivery window — currently arrival by Christmas for the open batch in North America and Europe — and we email at assembly, dispatch and delivery. If a batch's window moves materially, affected customers hear it from us first, with the new estimate and the free-cancellation right restated in the same message.
Batch membership is not a lottery and cannot be bought forward. Accessories in a robot order may ship earlier from stock; if they do, shipping already paid is not charged twice for our convenience.
Cancellation and refunds
Any unshipped order cancels in full, free, to the original payment method — robot, accessory or both. After delivery, the 30-day return promise in Shipping & Returns governs. Refunds are initiated when the carrier scans a return, settled by your bank's clock thereafter, and confirmed by email at initiation rather than completion, because 'we sent it' is the part we control.
If we must cancel an order — a discontinued finish, an unfixable catalogue fault — you are refunded in full automatically and told why in words, not codes. A store that can take money in four seconds can return it in an email it bothered to write.
Errors and availability
Stock and batch counts are earnest, not theatrical. If an error lets an order through that cannot be fulfilled as confirmed, we contact you before charging further, offering the nearest honest alternative or a full refund. Confirmed orders are never silently substituted — a Graphite household that ordered Lavender will receive an apology and a choice, never a surprise.
Nothing in this policy reduces statutory consumer rights in your region. Where local law is more generous than we are, it wins, and we will pretend it was our idea.
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.
Frequently asked questions
Is Microduck a toy or a real robot?+
A real robot wearing a friendly shape. Fifteen motors, a camera, a depth sensor and dual IMUs, driven by policies learned in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab — the same reinforcement-learning pipeline used for far larger machines, at ten inches tall.
When will my pre-order arrive?+
Current-batch pre-orders ship in reservation order and are scheduled to arrive by Christmas in North America and Europe. You will get emails when your robot enters assembly, when it ships, and when it is out for delivery.
Can I cancel or return it?+
Any unshipped order cancels free, in full. After delivery you have 30 days to live with the robot and still return it for a full refund. Every Microduck also carries a one-year warranty on motors, sensors and servos.
Can I program it myself?+
Yes — that is half the point. With the Developer Expansion Kit you can train behaviours in Isaac Lab, harden them against the Omniverse digital twin, and deploy them to real hardware, starting from our published example policies.
What if it falls and breaks?+
Falling is part of the design brief; fall recovery is a trained behaviour, not a hope. If hardware ever does fail in normal use, the one-year warranty covers repair or replacement, including shipping in launch regions.
Which finish should I choose?+
Whichever you want to look at. Cream, Graphite, Lavender and Sky share identical hardware, policies and accessory compatibility, so the decision is purely emotional — the correct kind of decision for a robot with a beak.
Microduck. From $399.
Ships by Christmas in North America & Europe. Free cancellation until it ships, 30-day returns after it lands.