Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry

https://venturebeat.com/ai/hugging-face-just-launched-a-299-robot-that-could-disrupt-the-entire-robotics-industry/

by fdaudens • 1 year ago

124 112 1 year ago

fdaudens• 1 year ago

Reachy Mini has a Raspberry Pi 5, WiFi, 4 microphones, 5W speaker, wide-angle camera, accelerometer, animated antennas, full head and body movement, and can run on battery or wired power. Ships in batches from fall 2025, priced at $449 plus taxes and shipping.

Y_Y• 1 year ago

$299 robot "costs" $449 before unavoidable additional charges

sigh

mdaniel• 1 year ago

For anyone else confused by the headline citing one price and this comment citing another, it turns out the difference is between the "Mini Lite" and the "Mini" - the Lite seems to be connected to a computer all the time, and thus has no on-board compute, no accelerometers, no WiFi, and only half the microphones. My suspicion is that the $299 one is for playing around and the $450 one is if you want it to chase the cat around while you're at work

wat100002• 1 year ago

It doesn’t look like even the more expensive one can move under its own power. Calling this a “robot” is quite, uh, imaginative.

rossdavidh2• 1 year ago

Reachy Mini Lite specs say: "Compatible with Mac and Linux (Windows soon)"

Ahahahahaha! Ahem. How the mighty have fallen.

SirFatty• 1 year ago

are you suggesting that Windows doesn't have the majority of the install base?

hosteur• 1 year ago

It probably do not have a majority in this target segment. Which is something.

mrln• 1 year ago

I think they suggest that Mac and Linux are supported while Windows is not. But maybe I have issues with my eyes...

danielbln• 1 year ago

It certainly doesn't have the mindshare.

tomrod• 1 year ago

Arguably Alpine or whatever serverless uses has the majority of individual instantiations.

Windows has a lot of the long-lived corporateware.

furyofantares• 1 year ago

The daily word games I run are obviously dominated by phones, but then I have 10% macOS and 6% Windows, which surprised me when I checked in on it recently.

gandalfian• 1 year ago

I think they are all lucky it doesn't say "android and ios only" like many gadgets these days. Desktops are dying, I feel old...

xnx2• 1 year ago

Windows would probably work through WSL, right?

rossdavidh2• 1 year ago

Probably, and it's coming soon, so it doesn't really matter. But, it's not what you would have seen when I started in this field.

Aurornis4• 1 year ago

This is definitely an artifact of the developers writing code for themselves first.

kimi• 1 year ago

In the end, I'm not sure I get what this is for - the venturebeat piece seems written by an AI.

handfuloflight• 1 year ago

The only disruption here is the hyperbole.

agilob• 1 year ago

Raspberry pi with microphone and camera.

kikokikokiko• 1 year ago

Some years down the road I can see this thing being remembered like the Pets.com doll.

r-johnv• 1 year ago

"disrupt the robotics industry" is a pretty dishonest exaggeration.

This desktop toy basically has a few sensors and a moveable head. No capability to pick/grasp/move an object or do any actual task.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

This is destined to just be some thing people play with for a bit, get bored, and turn into e-waste.

ausbah• 1 year ago

it is very cute regardless of it being a good idea. and like a raspberry pi for ai

alganet• 1 year ago

I could be mistaken, but this is the industry currently dominated by vacuum cleaners that mostly serve as cat beds, isn't it?

So, disrupting it, is making whatever gizmo sells more than a vacuum cleaner.

Sounds very important and high tech.

yojo• 1 year ago

There are quite a few kid-targeted coding robots. I get that this has some Hugging Face integrations, but is there anything else here I’m missing that differentiates Reachy Mini?

It seems weird for a “$4.5 billion artificial intelligence platform” to be pivoting into the toy space.

thomascountz• 1 year ago

A Stewart platform for a head with wobbly antennae for secondary movement is incredibly expressive!

The line between robot and animatronic is often blurred. I know there are industry definitions—or at least de facto conventions—but for me a robot is something that performs and controls "mechanical work" based on external sensing or input. For me, the output "work" isn't meant to solely be character expression.

That said, animatronics from Disney Imagineers really blur the line for me.

incomingpain• 1 year ago

Very interesting its coming from hugging face? have they ever done hardware before?

Is it supposed to just be an amazon echo type unit?

Why all the movement capability?

It codes in python, but what would that code be doing?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 1 year ago

They say "$299," but it looks a ways off from hitting the shelves.

In my experience, these "intended MSRP prices" tend to be ... aspirational.

phh3• 1 year ago

Looking at the BOM (6 cheapest servos, one usb camera, a usb hub, a microctronller ,two mics, 30cm-high low-precision plastic) the price looks fairly realistic to me. I could imagine it at half the price on aliexpress. The manufacturing or sourcing doesn't seem complicated. So overall it looks like a very realistic endeavor.

The only negative point I see: Pollen Robotics doesn't seem used to do mass market/cheap products. But as I said, it seems to be a pretty simple production (I mean, they are probably running everywhere like crazy because nothing is ready and everything is broken, but they should be able to accomplish this)

ChrisMarshallNY2• 1 year ago

My experience is that BoM estimates tend to be inaccurate. Look at Apple kit.

There’s the cost of materials, the cost of distribution and storage, Corporate Overhead, NRE, and then the “Because We Can Get Away With It” surcharge.

nico• 1 year ago

The robot mostly looks like a very basic alternative to the Lego robotics offerings (mindstorms/technic/spike). And, they are in more or less the same price range as well

Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company

garciasn• 1 year ago

I am not sure what HF is going for here either, because it doesn't actually do anything; yet?

I mean, great: I have another $300 toy in the makerspace arena that I can program. Awesome; I write code and am heavily invested personally and professionally with LLMs (open-weight models running on local GPUs as well as LLM chatbots that everyone knows, like Gemini, OpenAI, and Claude). Now what? It'll sit on my desk and maybe gather dust, if it's not dancing, because...it doesn't actually have a point or built in capabilities out of the gate--at least not that I can see--aside from looking cute and dancing according to the video in the press-release-article; all things that any $30 toy on Amazon can already do.

sheepscreek• 1 year ago

Perhaps they needed to do something to justify raising another round?

Aurornis4• 1 year ago

I don’t see the comparison to Mindstorms

This is more like a Furby that you’re supposed to connect to your AI system’s audio/video interface so people can interact with a stationary humanoid device

alnwlsn• 1 year ago

Hardly. This seems like the opposite alternative, something that has minimal or no mechanical hardware provisions, and few ways to interface with external motors and sensors.

refulgentis• 1 year ago

I love huggingface and they've done a lot for the industry

...But...

I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.

I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.

That's the cost side as far as I understand it.

On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.

How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.

microtonal• 1 year ago

This question comes up quite often, but Hugging Face is profitable: https://xcancel.com/ClementDelangue/status/18116753863689666...

There is a variety of income sources, including inference and Hub Pro and enterprise subscriptions [1].

[1] https://huggingface.co/pricing

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

Many many big words, and yet zero indication of what this robot might actually do that's useful. Unless it's primarily used as a learning/hobbyist tool -- in which case it's cool, but not going to "disrupt" anything.

I do like that it's open source though.

xnx2• 1 year ago

"Reachy" is a weird name for a toy that has no arm or hand capable of interacting with its environment.

phh3• 1 year ago

So, my brain defaulted to "people are smart, so it makes sense", so it understood it as "it's the toy you keep within reach". But if you look at Pollen Robotics product, you see they have a "Reachy", which can indeed move, and has arms to interact with its environment. So yeah, it's a weird name. It reaches your heart through the feeling it communicates to you with its antennas?

blueprint2• 1 year ago

"Hugging face" is also a pretty weird name

Finnucane• 1 year ago

Reachy by Hugging Face sounds like something I expect is going to emerge explosively from one's abdomen.

kelseyfrog• 1 year ago

It's an easy bet that people will outfit the thing with arms, legs, wheels, tentacles - you name it. Assuming it can be modded, it will be modded.

Dusseldorf• 1 year ago

Presumably it's a reference to the disruption claims in the marketing--a giant reach.

clmnt• 1 year ago

no need for arms to reach your heart

shrubble• 1 year ago

For some reason it reminds me of the Nabaztag rabbit shaped, Internet connected device of a dozen years ago.

raesene9• 1 year ago

I was thinking the exact thing. I used to like my Nabaztags although (from the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag ) it seems it was not a commercial success.

FloatArtifact• 1 year ago

Here I thought it was a robot that could do something useful, like clean the floors that was open source.

MeteorMarc• 1 year ago

There is a Black Mirror episode about a robot doll!

waltbosz• 1 year ago

Aren't there a couple of episodes like that? Are you referring to the episode with Miley Cyrus?

The others I'm thinking of are the plush bear that contains a AI copy of a human mind, and the killer robot dogs.

gmuslera• 1 year ago

In fact, I was expecting that it used Miley Cyrus voice. Nothing tells better that you are different if you are able to do that after the Scarlett Johansson case.

amelius• 1 year ago

And I suppose it wasn't even user-programmable.

I bet in a few years we'll be walking between cute looking potential killer machines and everybody will think it is normal.

carld• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the Anki Cozmo Robot so I’m curious how they will try to be successful where Anki failed.

phh3• 1 year ago

Could we rather get a link to the original blog post? https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini

wackget• 1 year ago

Nothing in the article, the video, or the manufacturer's own blog post explains what this thing actually does. Seriously. This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.

As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.

pmdr• 1 year ago

This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.

As is probably more than half of the inescapable AI hype. Imagine replacing most devices and workers with their hallucinating counterparts.

NetRunnerSu2• 1 year ago

Humans can also have hallucinations, but they can be grounded quickly, and models with freezing weights are never possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488126

Aurornis4• 1 year ago

The blog explains it: It can move its head, antennas, and rotate. It’s a little humanoid desk toy to stand in for computer interaction.

It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” like the Venture Beat headline says. It’s a little animated thing to house the AV equipment.

paradox460• 1 year ago

So a modern version of keepon? Will it dance to spoon?

falcor842• 1 year ago

It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry”

This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".

neuralRiot• 1 year ago

Maybe as “disruptive” to the robotic industry as a 3d printer is disruptive to the industrial machining sector.

const_cast• 1 year ago

So, a Furby?

At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.

Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?

And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.

knowitnone• 1 year ago

you saw the video - it bobs its head and records all your activities and audio to send back to HQ.

chris_mnhn• 1 year ago

i thought it was kinda obvious, given the raspberry pi and programmable interface: it doesn't _do_ anything on its own, but its a programmable robot that you can tell what to do. i'm speculating that there'll be a marketplace of user-submitted and official HuggingFace "apps" to load onto it

georgeecollins• 1 year ago

OMG!!! I want one in my office so that every time someone comes in it will turn to look at them with those camera eyes and creep people out. That's a very valuable use case IMO.

zahlman• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, I'm just noticing that the HN title filter can seriously damage meaning when it removes words like "how" or specific numbers (despite the obvious reasons for doing so), but apparently doesn't care about phrases like "disrupt the ... industry".

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

It's a toy. It does not compete in any way with the robots they place it in context with. It's like saying my 40$ Raspberry Pi is a serious contender for Dell's latest 40.000$ 3U enterprise server.

blueprint2• 1 year ago

it reaches for stuff

raywatcher• 1 year ago

Whent to check their own website about it and it seems to be “an expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation. Fully programmable in Python (and soon JavaScript, Scratch) and priced from $299, it's your gateway into robotics AI: fun, customizable, and ready to be part of your next coding project.” From what I’ve read in the rest of their press release you are pretty spot on on the smart rotating speaker

mrbonner• 1 year ago

"could disrupt" with what? Cute voice and wiggling antennas?

fathomdeez• 1 year ago

The conglomerate of Big Furby™ will finally be taken down

johnisgood• 1 year ago

I read a lot of words, incl. collaborate, love, whatever.

But what does the robot do exactly?

I can collaborate perfectly well with LLMs, no need for a physical robot to do just that.

I am genuinely lost about this product.

lkajlskrtj3• 1 year ago

It makes money?

lkajlskrtj3• 1 year ago

This isn't the single most hyperbolic headline I've ever seen, but I hope it's the most wildly unrealistic headline I see today. 50/50 odds.

stevoski• 1 year ago

Are we still using the word “disrupt” to describe unremarkable new products?

I thought we were over that.

lkajlskrtj3• 1 year ago

This is silicon valley. We'll never be over it.

wat100002• 1 year ago

Strong Baymax aesthetic on this. To the point where I expect Disney to sue it into oblivion in about five seconds.

libraryatnight• 1 year ago

The video makes it seem like a real product, the website/blog makes it seem like a collection of hardware to get started hacking on huggingface AI in combination with some basic robotics. The blog got me more excited than the video. Could be fun to tinker, and opensource hardware is cool.

duxup• 1 year ago

This article provides nothing to support its premise. Garbage hype article.

srg0• 1 year ago

So, basically, another smart speaker skinned as a toy robot.

r33b33• 1 year ago

Doesn't have arms. Can't clean my room. Can't jack me off. Useless.

Aurornis4• 1 year ago

The blog post has actual details, but I’m even more confused after reading it: https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini

The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic.

As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate, but can’t manipulate anything.

ofrzeta• 1 year ago

What you say is true. It's also a physical vehicle for speech models from Huggingface, which might be fun. However I don't understand where the computation for that will take place.

arnath• 1 year ago

The thing is just a cute robot that you can interact with, ala Vector (https://anki.bot/products/vector-robot)

DealFl0w• 1 year ago

$449 for the full model. This is grift shift in action, not education-friendly pricing.

Bjorkbat• 1 year ago

Alright, it does look pretty charming, and I especially like that it's open-source since pretty much anyone buying a domestic robot is likely to be a tinkerer of some sort, but at the same time it reminds me of the Jibo (https://robotsguide.com/robots/jibo).

For those who don't remember (I couldn't remember the name, only the face, had to look hard for it) it was a desktop robot released in 2014 that was hyped pretty hard at the time. It didn't help that the company that launched it was founded by a fairly well-known MIT professor.

And yeah, it was a flop. The $900 price tag wasn't helping things, but neither was the fact that it didn't really do anything that an Alexa couldn't. You bought it solely because you really liked the idea of robots and thought it was cool, not at all for its value around the house.

I'm not gonna dunk on this too hard since it's probably just a fun company side-project, but I might change my tune if they get too high on hype.

__alexander• 1 year ago

If it can play Spotify using voice commands I’d buy it to replace my Apple HomePod.

bapak2• 1 year ago

It can also stream video—but in the opposite direction!

lvl155• 1 year ago

Lego needs to bring back the robotics line. They dropped the ball and chased AFOL for money.

fxtentacle• 1 year ago

VentureBeat is lying.

It's a speaker + microphone + camera case with a rotate-able head that you can put a Raspberry PI inside. There's no way this will disrupt the robotics industry. It's just another toy.

Here's some actual info:

https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini

leecarraher2• 1 year ago

what's wrong with the ps2 style serial port on my roomba and a rpi0w

rafram• 1 year ago

One of the challenges with robotics is that you know you can’t just build on your laptop. You need to have some sort of robotics partner to help in your building, and most people won’t be able to buy $70,000 robots

Sure, but presumably those $70,000 robots aren't just a cute case for a Raspberry Pi + camera module.

leecarraher2• 1 year ago

i feel like you could buy a furby and shave it for way less than $299

pton_xd• 1 year ago

I guess hosting binary files for a niche community just isn't that time consuming! Really surprised there isn't some social network angle yet.

MysticFear• 1 year ago

A great way for younger people to play with AI and learn. Why all the hate?

era86• 1 year ago

I'd love to tinker with one of these, but have it look and sound like 2XL... my millennial heart would be full with nostalgia.

glonq• 1 year ago

I work in the robotics industry and expect zero disruption from this.

It looks like a cute fun little toy though!

oliwarner• 1 year ago

A camera, six 9g servos, a DC motor for the base, two microphones, a speaker and some digital glue... Maybe $25 plus the shell and assembly.

Tidy profit, even on the Lite version.

Edit: Curious to know what someone downed this for. Even from a sketchy CGI video you can see the head moves on four struts. You can do a cardboard DIY on an ESP32 for $10. Consumer robotics with sloppy tolerances are dirt cheap and I see no reason why this doesn't fit that remit.

bsoles• 1 year ago

Please don't put "robots" with cameras and Wi-Fi inside kids' rooms.

bapak2• 1 year ago

Don't worry, it's very smart! You (and the rest of the internet) can program it to do or say what you want! You're in safe hands™

Melatonic• 1 year ago

Sounds like that old Jibo bot from 2014

Zaskoda• 1 year ago

The closest I've personally experienced to the "dream" is Vector:

https://anki.bot/products/vector-robot

The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.

Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.

But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.

croes2• 1 year ago

Looks like those desktop robots on kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obboto/obboto-glowbot

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tangiblefuture/looi-rob...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/energize-lab/eilik-a-li...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyitechnology/meet-loo...

etc.

croes2• 1 year ago

I would be more interested in something like this as open source:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/disney-robot

stevenalowe• 1 year ago

immobile toy https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini

Havoc• 1 year ago

huge possibilities

I'm not seeing it. A head that can move and wiggling antennas just isn't useful or even a usable interaction interface.

The vid is people waving at it, two people separately demonstrating the same demo (tracking people's hands), head bopping up and down (possibly in sync with music?) and a girl staring at it lovingly.

skeledrew• 1 year ago

This has me looking at the Mycroft Mark 1 (backed on Kickstarter) that's been sitting unused for years on my chest of drawers, and thinking about the Mark 2 that I backed but the order was never fulfilled as the company ran into serious issues.

Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry

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