Hugging Face just unveiled HopeJR, a full-size open-source humanoid with 66 degrees of freedom priced around $3,000, and Reachy Mini, a $300 desktop unit for testing AI apps. Built with Pollen Robotics tech, both aim to keep robotics out of proprietary black boxes, with early shipments slated for late 2025.
Hugging Face just launched the SO-101, an open-source, 3D-printable robotic arm starting at $100. An upgrade to the popular SO-100, it features better motors and an integrated camera for reinforcement learning tasks like sorting Legos. Fully assembled units run up to $500 depending on the supplier.
Hugging Face just acquired French startup Pollen Robotics to accelerate its push into embodied AI. The company plans to sell Pollen's humanoid robot, Reachy 2, while letting developers download and improve its open codebase. It marks a major step in bringing open-source collaboration directly to physical robot hardware.
Hugging Face just launched LeRobot, an open-source robotics library designed to act as the "Transformers for robotics." The toolkit includes pretrained models, simulation integrations, and lightweight dataset tools to control hardware from robotic arms to humanoids. Why it matters: Hugging Face is betting on open-source and crowdsourced data to prevent big tech from monopolizing physical AI.
