🦆 Hugging Face drops cute, duck robot

August 29, 2026   |   Read online Welcome back, Superhuman. China just held what looked suspiciously like the Olympics of the future. Humanoid robots smashed decades-old sprint records, flew nearly eight meters through the air, and showcased the fascinating leaps and advances in the technology. Meanwhile, Hugging Face just dropped a cute duck robot for your home, and it costs less than a mid-range smartphone.       The Robotics Special is designed to help you stay on the cutting edge of breakthroughs and products in robotics. Regular AI updates resume on Monday.       WHAT’S NEXT The most important news in robotics this week Click here to see Hugging Face’s cute, $399 duck robot in action. Photo: Pollen Robotics 1. Everything that happened at China’s World Humanoid Robot Games: Videos from the event flooded our socials this week, demonstrating the leaps China has taken in robotics in the last year. Here’s everything you might have missed: Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second 100m record, once seemingly untouchable, came tumbling down thrice over the two days. Running was only the beginning. Tiangong Ultra launched itself 7.97 meters through the air to win the long jump in a stunning display of athleticism. China also showcased its humanoid robots playing tennis and table tennis, tracking incoming balls, predicting their trajectory, and returning shots in real time. But for all their advances, robots still have a long way to go. See this robot trying to lift weights and epically failing. 2. Hugging Face goes viral with a cute, $399 duck robot: The Microduck can waddle, roller skate, and pick up items with its beak, all powered by an open reinforcement-learning stack developers can freely modify. The company frames it as democratizing "physical AI," with the launch landing right as Hugging Face is reportedly being eyed for a $13B acquisition by Nvidia. The company has already racked up $1 million in sales from Microduck. You can see the robot waddle around here. 3. Generalist rockets to a $3 billion valuation in two months: The robotics startup has picked up nearly $200 million more in funding, extending a Series B that valued it at $2 billion back in June. The company's Gen 1.5 model, which lets robots learn new tasks from video clips as short as 3 seconds, has investors betting on robotics reaching its own "ChatGPT moment." Rivals like Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are valued even higher, at $11 billion and $14 billion. SPONSORED BY MINTLIFY Agents are reading your docs & making buying decisions Across the 200,000+ docs pages that Mintlify powers, AI agents now account for over 66% of visits. What does this mean for your business? Your customers ask agents first, and agents answer with whatever your docs told them.  Behind every agent is a person deciding whether to buy from you. Mintlify's Agent Score shows where your docs stand; run it for your docs and get a report with actionable improvement steps, free. Check if your docs are agent-ready → ROBOTS IN ACTION How robots are transforming the world around us Photo: @MeteKarsli0glu on X Care Critters: Scientists have fitted giant burrowing cockroaches with cameras and tiny remote-controlled injectors, aiming to turn them from mobile sensors into real first responders. In testing, the "paraborgs" hit their injection target 95% of the time at close range, with the full navigate-and-inject task succeeding 72% of the time. Researchers say swarms of these insects could be deployed in real disaster zones in 5 to 10 years. Storm Breaker: Y Combinator-backed Meteoric Technologies claims its drones can fly into low overcast clouds and tweak water droplets to let more sunlight reach solar farms below. So far, the only evidence presented by the startup is a prototype, which dissipated an artificial cloud by just 13% in a lab chamber. The company's larger goal is to use the technology to weaken hurricanes — a claim that has drawn sharp skepticism from meteorologists. Pit Crew: In Nashville, Lyft's Flexdrive unit is opening an 80,000-square-foot depot to clean, charge, and inspect Waymo robotaxis, staffing it with 70 workers, about half of them former Lyft drivers. Since robotaxis can rack up 100,000 miles a year, they need servicing multiple times a day — a small but telling example of AI reshaping jobs rather than simply erasing them. INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT Everything else you need to know this week Photo: Bloomberg Here are the biggest developments in the robotics space that you should know about: SoftBank is reportedly in talks to buy a majority stake in 1X Technologies at a $6B valuation, deepening its bet on humanoid robotics. BlackBerry claims robotics is one of the fastest-growing parts of its QNX software business, positioning the company to ride the rise of physical AI. Unitree shares have plunged 45% from their debut peak, sparking fears that China’s humanoid robotics boom is running ahead of fundamentals. Vitestro, a medical robotics company, has won FDA De Novo authorization for Aletta, the first fully autonomous robotic blood draw device cleared in the US. Tesla owners are posting videos of themselves sleeping while their cars drive, raising fresh concerns about driver misuse and overtrust in Autopilot-style systems. PRESENTED BY THE CODE 100+ coding prompts top engineers use to ship 5X faster Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are on every engineer's tech stack. Most still get average output because they treat them like a search bar. The top engineers work from a system. These 100+ proven prompts are that system. Sign up for The Code and get: 100+ ready-to-use prompts built on real use cases from Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, so you ship in minutes instead of hours The Code newsletter (5 min daily) so you keep mastering AI coding and stay ahead. The prompts are just the beginning. Claim your free prompts ROBOT OF THE WEEK A robot that caught our eye this week Photo: Photon Matrix This is the closest thing to an Iron Dome for mosquitoes.  Photon Matrix has unveiled a portable mosquito air defense system that combines LiDAR, radar, and AI vision to spot flying insects within a 20-foot field, then fires a visible blue laser to zap them mid-air. An optional rotating base extends coverage to a full 360 degrees, and the unit runs 4 to 5 hours off a power bank. It's a genuinely wild upgrade from bug spray, using military-style targeting tech to defend your backyard barbecue. You can check it out here. ROBO REELS Watch: Eerie footage shows robots surrounding and watching someone’s house at night Photo: LA Times Delivery robots may be watching you. A Los Angeles woman has filmed several sidewalk delivery robots idling outside her house after dark, lights on and cameras forward — something she finds extremely creepy. See the footage here. Companies like Serve Robotics and Coco Robotics route their fleets to stage in high-demand zones between deliveries, which often means residential streets. Chicago residents have already filed 800 petition signatures over similar issues, and some cities now cap how long robots can loiter on a sidewalk. Your opinion matters! You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email. Please let us know what you thought of today’s email to help us create better emails for you. What did you think of today's email? Your feedback helps me create better emails for you! 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