Hugging Face is one of the most trusted names in the open source AI space, providing easy access to thousands of models, datasets, and apps across numerous machine learning verticals. Over the years, it’s evolved into one of the most popular ecosystems for AI enthusiasts to experiment and collaborate. This time around, the outfit is looking to extend its reach to everyone’s desktop with the release of the Hugging Face Reachy Mini.
A small, programmable robot, the device lets you take your AI experiments to the real-world, giving you a robot that can physically interact with people and objects around it. Granted, there’s no shortage of desktop-sized programmable robots out there aimed at the enthusiast crowd, so it’s not exactly all that unique at the moment.
The Hugging Face Reachy Mini isn’t the most exciting robot. It has no arms (which is odd for a robot named Reachy) and no feet, so it’s designed to stay in the same spot. As far as movement, it can rotate its body a full 360 degrees, so you can make it pan around smoothly, while the head gets six degrees of freedom, allowing it to move around in an animated manner. The top of the head comes with two antennas that can also move in a variety of ways, giving it additional ways of interacting with people in the real world. Suffice to say, the head movement, antenna movement, and rotating body should let you program it with a good variety of expressive movements.
It has a built-in camera for computer vision, allowing it to see the environment around it, as well as four microphones for picking up sound input, which should take full advantage of Hugging Face’s natural language processing libraries. There’s also a 5W speaker onboard, which it can use for verbal communication and sound effects. It has a built-in battery and a Wi-Fi radio, by the way, allowing you to use it completely untethered, as well as an accelerometer, so it can react to movements it detects in the real-world.
The Hugging Face Reachy Mini is powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 board computer, so it’s probably running a custom Linux flavor. You can program it using the Python SDK, with support for more languages available soon. Hugging Face, by the way, offers a simulation SDK at their Hub, which you can use to test and develop projects for the robot virtually, so you can start coding for it to have your programs ready when you do receive it. According to the outfit, they currently have a set of 15 preprogrammed behaviors for the automaton, so you start playing around with it out of the box.
Do note, the whole thing is sold as a kit. That means, it’s unassembled, so you’ll have to put it together yourself upon receipt. This is not surprising, considering it’s aimed at the enthusiast crowd. They also have a Lite version available that has no battery, Wi-Fi, or accelerometer, while being usable for Mac and Windows users.
The Hugging Face Reachy Mini is now available for preorder, priced at $479. Shipments start later in the fall.
