YouDuck.ai

Hardware and buying

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This section answers the questions that come before the purchase and right after it: what it costs, which pack to take, what arrives in the box, and which accessories earn their place.

The short answer

$399 for the base robot, and the box already contains the gamepad and battery — it works out of the box. Add the dev pack ($119) if you intend to change code or run it for long stretches; add the charger pack ($39) if you just want to play for longer.

What it costs

Item Price Notes
Base robot $399 Introductory price, before tax and shipping
Charger pack $39 Charger
Dev pack $119 Spare motors, spare batteries, charger, NFC tags, tools
Accessory pack $39 Rollers, ball, laser pointer, NFC tags

Preorders opened 27 August 2026, in four colourways.

What the base robot includes

The robot, a battery, a USB-C cable, and a game controller.

The pad being included is worth stressing — a lot of comparable products expect you to bring your own. Seven trained moves ship on the robot, so you do not have to learn to train first.

Is the dev pack worth it

The valuable part of the $119 pack is the spare motors.

The reasoning is practical: fifteen Dynamixel XL330 servos, and the shipped move set includes standing up after a fall and a forward roll — motions that put real shock through the joints. If you plan to do sim2real work, which means repeatedly putting unvalidated policies on real hardware, burning out a servo is a matter of time, and a spare saves the wait.

If you only want a desk robot and never plan to train your own policies, this pack does nothing for you.

The rollers in the accessory pack

The wheels in the $39 pack are not a novelty. Microduck has a whole separate family of roller policies — the training repository carries six roller tasks: velocity tracking, swizzle skating, crouching while gliding, gliding down slopes, standing up onto the wheels, and spinning in place.

Fit the wheels and hold D-pad up for three seconds: the robot quacks twice, returns to its home pose, loads the roller policies and drives again. No restart. See Gamepad controls.

What else you need

To develop, two things beyond the robot:

  • A dev board. A customer robot deliberately refuses builds signed with the team dev key, so changing the software means provisioning a board for it.
  • A CUDA GPU for training. Without one, training can run on Hugging Face Jobs by adding --hf-jobs.

To just use it, nothing else at all.

Official channels