Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots

Hug Is ready for developers to start tinkering and test the latest robotics release.

The AI ​​development platform announced on Wednesday that it is now accepting orders for its Reachy Mini Desktop Robots. The company initially revealed the prototypes of these devices in May, in addition to a greater humanoid robot named Hopejr.

Cuddling face said it is planning to release two versions of the Reachy Mini. The first one, called 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 must be connected to a computer source, but cheaper at $ 299.

The Open Source Robots are in a kit for developers to build themselves. The Reachy Minis are approximately the size of a standard stuffed animal and are supplied with two screens in mind and two antennas.

Once built, these robots are fully programmable in Python. These devices are also supplied with a set of pre -installed demos and are integrated with the Hugging face hubThe company’s open Source Machine Learning Platform, which gives users access to more than 1.7 million AI models and more than 400,000 data sets.

Clém Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, told WAN that they decided to launch two versions of the Reachy Mini on the basis of first feedback on the original prototype of the company. An early tester discovered that their five -year -old daughter wanted to take the desktoprobot home. The company thought she wouldn’t be the only one.

“The goal in the future is to keep getting a lot of feedback from such users, from the community, so we have always built products at Hugging Face as an open source community platform,” said Delangue. “Because of the nature that it is open source, this means that people can expand, change it, change everything they want.”

The target group for these devices is AI developers, said Delangue. With the Reachy Minis, users can code, build and test AI applications on the desktoprobot.

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

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

Delangue added that this release is really in line with what Hugging Face focuses on its robotics program in general – open source hardware that gives users full control.

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