Forget Disney’s BDX Droid — the $399 Hugging Face Microduck robot is even more adorable and versatile thanks to Lidar, NFC and, yes, roller skates

Microduck is Pollen Robotics' new programmable robot It looks like a cute robo-duck, and has some adorable, pre-baked interactions It's up for pre-order priced at $399, and it should ship in time for Christmas If the measure of a successful robot is cuteness, Microduck could be the most successful bot in ages.

Unveiled this week by Pollen Robotics (a division of AI company Hugging Face — yes, that Hugging Face ), Microduck is a 25-centimeter-tall educational robot that appears to arrive with surprising mobility, balance, and personality.

Pre-orders, which kicked off today (August 27) promise a $399 (that's the introductory price), roughly 1.7lb pre-built duck-like robot complete with a mouth that doubles as a gripper, a voice —duck calls, it seems — 15 degrees of freedom (basically a measure of the number of ways all the motors let it move), and motors that let it walk, waddle, move its head and, thanks to a pair of IMUs (inertial movement unit), stay upright even when pushed around. (Image credit: Pollen Robotics) There's a single-eye camera paired with a Lidar system for navigating its environment and, perhaps, recognizing its owner.

Pollen Robotics has yet to specify the camera's megapixels.

There are also speakers for voice, and microphones for it to hear.

The robot runs on a relatively low-power Rockchip RK3566 ARM chip that's backed by 1GB of RAM and 32GB of on-board storage.

There's on-board Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and a smallish 2,600mAh battery that promises roughly one hour of operation.

These are not killer specs, but the teaser videos show a highly engaged and undeniably adorable little bot.

I was particularly taken with how it can recover and stand back up after a fall (or being pushed over).

Microduck will arrive with a lot of pre-programmed interactions, but much of the cuteness may come via its open-source platform and your programming skills.

The Microduck kit will ship with an SDK that includes virtual training environments, along with training scripts and tools, and "a tested sim-to-real workflow." The idea, obviously, is that while you might grow to love Microducks' baked-in personality, it's what you can build with your kids that will really matter.

This is an educational robot, after all.

It's almost familiar Pollen Robotics Pollen Robotics It's also worth mentioning Microduck's obvious resemblance to another extremely cute, though entirely unattainable robot: Disney's and Star Wars' BDX Droid .

Both robots are bipedal with a somewhat squat posture and cute, oversized heads, and as with the BDX-Droid, it's hard to believe the Microsoduck can stay upright.