Hugging Face Is Reaching with This One
Reachy Mini is a cute, low-cost robot from Hugging Face that is perfect for learning and experimenting with embodied AI.
It may be an odd name for a robot without arms, but the cute design and low price tag of Reachy Mini will have you trying to high five this little bot anyway. Hugging Face’s Reachy Mini is the first fruits of their integration with Pollen Robotics, which they acquired just a few months ago. The robot was expressly designed to help people learn how to build artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machines with minimal barriers to entry.
The eleven-inch tall Reachy Mini may not be the most versatile robot around, with no arms or means of locomotion. But what it lacks in mobility, it makes up for in intelligence. As you might expect, it is tightly integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem, so a vast array of pretrained AI models are ready for use with Reachy Mini. That makes experimentation with everything from computer vision to voice recognition a snap.
The robot can be programmed with Python (JavaScript and Scratch support are on the way), and it comes equipped with a wide-angle camera, accelerometer, microphones, and a speaker. The only movement you will get out of Reachy Mini is via its six degrees of freedom head, rotations of its body, and dancing antennae.
Two versions are available, with the Reachy Mini Lite coming in at $299, and the regular Reachy Mini costing $449. The pricier model comes with a Raspberry Pi 5 for onboard computation, while the Lite version relies on a host computer for processing. Upgrading also gets you a rechargeable battery and Wi-Fi connectivity. Deliveries of the Lite will begin later this summer, with the upgraded models shipping starting in the fall, and into next year.
Right out of the box, the robots come with around 15 preprogrammed behaviors so that you can test things out. Once these behaviors start to get old, you can write your own code, or download other people’s creations from the extensive Hugging Face community. Be warned, however, that Reachy Mini is still in the early development stages, so you might run into some bugs. Hugging Face is offering no warranties or guarantees, so you are paying to be a guinea pig. If you need a turnkey solution, you might want to hang on for a bit longer until all the bugs have been worked out by early adopters.