Microduck feathering nest on brisk sales

A 25-centimeter-tall robot duck priced at $399 has become a showcase for China's growing role in the global race to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world, industry experts said on Thursday.

They made the comments as Microduck, a bipedal robot unveiled late last month by France's Pollen Robotics — owned by New York-based AI platform Hugging Face — saw sales top $2.6 million within 24 hours of product launch, with demand pushing delivery times for new orders to four to six months.

Behind the robotic fine-feathered friend is a Chinese manufacturing ecosystem spanning processors, electronics engineering and supply-chain management, highlighting how China is seeking to parlay decades of expertise in consumer electronics and advanced manufacturing into an advantage in physical AI.

The robot is manufactured in China, according to Pollen Robotics. Shenzhen, Guangdong province-based startup Seeed Studio, which helps hardware developers move from prototypes to mass production, is involved in manufacturing Microduck, according to tech media reports.

"Building reliable relationships with hundreds of suppliers is a nightmare for a startup. The city's advantages go beyond cost to a network of suppliers and engineers capable of rapidly turning prototypes into mass-produced products," Seeed Studio founder and CEO Eric Pan said in an interview this year about Shenzhen's hardware ecosystem.

Microduck packs 15 motors, a camera, miniature lidar and two inertial measurement units into a body weighing less than 800 grams. It can walk, sit, squat, recover after falling and use its movable beak to grasp small objects.

At its heart is an RK3566 processor made by Chinese chip designer Rockchip, a general-purpose AIoT processor more commonly found in tablets, electronic-paper devices and smart-home products.

Rockchip told China Daily that the processor handles tasks including model inference, motion control, sensor processing, audio and video processing, and connectivity on Microduck.

The chip integrates an advanced CPU and a neural processing unit capable of 1 trillion operations per second, alongside image and video processing capabilities.

"For an application such as Microduck, which is small, lightweight and battery-powered, the chip is a very good fit," Rockchip said.

Notably, the processor was not originally designed specifically for robots. Components developed at scale for China's vast consumer-electronics sector can increasingly be repurposed for robots, allowing developers to draw from a ready-made reserve of chips, cameras, sensors, batteries and communications modules rather than building a supply chain from scratch.

Companies including Unitree Robotics, Agibot and Galbot are tapping supply chains originally built around electric vehicles, motors, reducers, sensors, batteries and consumer electronics.

Global humanoid robot shipments exceeded 22,000 units in the first half, nearly tripling from a year earlier, with Chinese manufacturers accounting for a lion's share, said Counterpoint Research.

McKinsey similarly said that China's robotics supply-chain strength increasingly derives not merely from labor costs, but from dense industrial clusters, economies of scale, intense supplier competition, and capabilities accumulated in electric vehicles and electromechanical manufacturing.

Wang Tianmiao, honorary director of the robotics institute at Beihang University, said embodied intelligence is not simply a contest of software and hardware, but a systems competition encompassing models, data, edge computing, robot bodies, application knowhow and viable business models.

China's complete manufacturing system and rapid industrial collaboration could give it an important advantage, Wang said.