Reachy is a modular humanoid platform designed for analysis. | Credit score: Pollen Robotics
In a call signaling its transfer into the bodily world, synthetic intelligence chief Hugging Face has acquired French robotics agency Pollen Robotics. The businesses yesterday introduced the acquisition for an undisclosed quantity. The acquisition underscores Hugging Face’s ambition to place robots as the following frontier for AI, advocating for an open, accessible, and customizable future.
The driving power behind this push is Hugging Face’s burgeoning robotics initiative, spearheaded by former Tesla engineer Remi Cadene. The acquisition of Pollen Robotics, based in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, brings that firm’s flagship product, Reachy, into Hugging Face’s portfolio.
The modular humanoid robotic was designed for analysis and schooling. Its newest iteration, Reachy 2, boasts options akin to digital actuality (VR) teleoperation, stereo imaginative and prescient, and spatial audio. The $70,000 robotic is at present deployed in establishments akin to Cornell College and Carnegie Mellon College.
I acquired the chance to work together with Reachy 2 at CES 2025. The platform contains a wheeled base, two arms, and pincher-like grippers. The demonstrations at CES 2025 had been all run by an onsite operator utilizing a VR headset for telepresence.
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Hugging Face seems to be to embodied AI
The Pollen Robotics staff is pleasant with the open-source group, a side of its go-to-market technique that doubtless attracted the eye of Hugging Face. The firm added that Reachy 2 is appropriate for embodied AI experiments.
“From the beginning, we constructed Pollen Robotics with open supply at its core, pushed by our perception that robots will play a profound position in our lives — serving because the interface between AI and the bodily world.” stated Matthieu Lapeyre, co-founder of Pollen Robotics. “Hugging Face is a pure residence for us to develop, as we share a typical aim: placing AI and robotics within the fingers of everybody.”
Hugging Face added that its strategic acquisition goals to combine its AI instruments with Reachy’s subtle {hardware}. This fusion will empower researchers and builders to assemble tailor-made, open-source robotic methods, breaking down the boundaries imposed by proprietary software program and {hardware}, it asserted.
The firm‘s leaders prompt that this fusion will speed up innovation within the discipline, making superior robotics extra available to a wider viewers.
“We imagine robotics might be the following frontier unlocked by AI — and it needs to be open, inexpensive, and personal,” stated Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientist at Hugging Face. “Our imaginative and prescient: a future the place everybody locally, from hobbyists to enterprises, can construct or use robotic assistants or video games, ranging from open options as a substitute of closed, remote-controlled, {hardware}.”