Hugging Face Opens Pre-Orders for Reachy Mini Desktop Robots
Hugging Face, which we all know and love for its AI development platform, is diving deeper into robotics. Guess what? You can now order their Reachy Mini desktop robots! Remember those prototypes they showed off earlier this year? Well, they're real, and they're almost here!
There will be two versions available. The Reachy Mini Wireless, priced at $449, is fully wireless and runs on a Raspberry Pi 5. The Reachy Mini Lite, at $299, needs to be connected to a computer. Both are open source kits. You get to build them yourself! They’re about the size of a stuffed animal, come with two screens for eyes, and antennas. After you assembled it, you can program it using Python.
According to Hugging Face, this project is aimed to AI developers. These little robots let you code, build, and test AI apps right on your desk. What I love most is that it’s all open source. “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 is expected to ship next month, while the wireless version will follow later this year. Hugging Face wants to get these robots into our hands ASAP. No long, drawn-out pre-order processes here!
The CEO of Hugging Face mentioned how important it is for robotics to be open source. He said that he would prefer a world where everyone has some control over robots. It is an important step for the company, which will provide open source hardware with total control for the users. Imagine millions of robots in homes controlled by one company. Scary, isn't it?
Source: TechCrunch