Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots

Hugging Face is ready for developers to start tinkering and testing its latest robotics release.

The AI development platform announced Wednesday that it’s now accepting orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots. The company initially unveiled the prototypes of these devices back in May, alongside a larger humanoid robot named HopeJR.

Hugging Face said it plans to release two versions of the Reachy Mini. The first, called the Reachy Mini Wireless, is wireless and costs $449 and runs on a Raspberry 5 mini computer. The second version is the Reachy Mini Lite, which needs to be connected to a computing source ,but is cheaper at $299.

The open source robots come in a kit for developers to build themselves. The Reachy Minis are about the size of a standard stuffed animal and come with two screens for eyes and two antennas.

Once built, these robots are fully programmable in Python. These devices also come with a set of pre-installed demos and are integrated with the Hugging Face Hub, the company’s open source machine learning platform, which gives users access to more than 1.7 million AI models and more than 400,000 datasets.

Clém Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, told TechCrunch they decided to launch two versions of the Reachy Mini based on initial feedback on the company’s original prototype. An early tester found that their five-year-old daughter wanted to be able to take the desktop robot around the house with her. The company figured she wouldn’t be the only one.

“The goal in the future is to keep carefully getting a lot of feedback like that from users, from the community, that’s how we’ve always been building products at Hugging Face as an open source community platform,” Delangue said. “By the nature of it being open source, it means that people will be able to extend it, modify it, change everything they want.”

The target audience for these devices is AI developers, Delangue said. The Reachy Minis allow users to code, build, and test AI applications on the desktop robot.

“Anyone will be able to build their own specific features and apps for Reachy Mini that then they’ll be able to share with the community,” Delangue said. “So we hope that it’s really going to unleash the creativity of builders to build, you know, millions of different applications, millions of different features that they can share with the community, so that anyone can then, like, plug and play with it.”

The Reachy Mini Lite should start shipping next month, with the wireless version shipping later this year. Delangue said it was important for the company to start shipping shortly after orders, as opposed to doing a long pre-order process with an unclear timeline, because they want to get the robots in users’ hands as fast as possible.

Delangue added this release is really in line with what Hugging Face is targeting for its robotics program in general — open source hardware that gives users complete control.

“I feel like it’s really important for the future of robotics to be open source, instead of being closed source, black box, [and] concentrated in the hands of a few companies,” Delangue said. “I think it’s quite a scary world to have like millions of robots in people’s home controlled by one company, with customers, users, not really being able to control them, understand them. I would much rather live in a place, or in a world, or in a country, where everyone can have some control over the robots.”