Hugging Face has made a name by providing open AI models. Now it’s providing an open robot.
What’s new: Hugging Face acquired the French company Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed price. It plans to offer Pollen’s Reachy 2, a robot that runs on code that’s freely available under an Apache 2.0 license, for $70,000.
How it works: Reachy 2 has two arms, gripper hands, and a wheeled base (optional). It’s designed primarily for education and research in human-robot interaction in real-world settings.
- Reachy 2 is programmable in Python and runs models from Hugging Face’s LeRobot library.
- It runs control software locally on a SolidRun Bedrock V3000 (a PC based on an AMD Ryzen Embedded V3000 processor) and processes AI in the cloud or on a local server.
- The robot responds to VR controllers including Meta Quest 2 and 3 as well as Pollen’s VR app.
- Its head senses the visual environment using a pair of cameras equipped with global shutters to capture fast-changing events and measures distances via an optical sensor. Its antennas are outfitted with microphones to capture sounds, and its torso senses distances using a depth camera. The base includes a lidar sensor to aid navigation.
- The body features 3D joints in the neck and wrists and 2D joints in the shoulders and elbows. Each arm can lift objects of up to 3 kilograms.
- A rechargeable, 24 volt battery provides around 10 hours of battery life.
Behind the news: Last year, Remi Cadene, who worked on Tesla’s Optimus, joined Hugging Face to lead robotics projects. In May, he and his team rolled out the LeRobot open source robotics code library, which provides pretrained models, datasets, and simulators for reinforcement learning and imitation learning. In November, Nvidia announced a collaboration with Hugging Face to accelerate LeRobot’s data collection, training, and verification.
Why it matters: Hugging Face’s acquisition of Pollen reflects an industry-wide investment in robots, notably humanoid robots, whose prices have been falling. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called AI-enabled robotics a “multi-trillion dollar” opportunity.
We’re thinking: AI-enabled robots are marching slowly toward what we hope will be breakthrough applications. Open-source systems are an important part of the trend!