AI powerhouse Hugging Face has acquired Frenchroboticscompany Pollen Robotics, known for its open-source bot,Reachy 2—a charming humanoid robot designed to interact naturally with humans.
Reachy
Standing at about human height, Reachy is a $70,000robotwith expressive movements, modular arms, and even a "head” that can track humans and respond with natural gestures. It’s designed to interact socially and can be programmed for tasks like handing items to people, reacting to voice commands, and performing repetitive actions in ahuman-likeway.
Built with open-source hardware and software, Reachy is fully customizable, making it a favorite in research and education spaces. It’s already been used in customer service and interactive demonstrations, but with Hugging Face’s advanced AI integration, it could become something far more capable and adaptable.
Manufacturing
This move could have big implications for the future ofmanufacturing. AccordingtoInc., many people simply don’t want traditional factory jobs anymore—they’re repetitive, physically taxing, and not appealing to younger generations.
This is where robots like Reachy come in; it could take on those tasks while remaining friendly, flexible, and safe around humans. Unlike industrial machines, Reachy is designed to safely work collaboratively alongside humans, handling monotonous tasks while being a friendly presence. It can help fill critical labor gaps without “replacing” workers.
Hugging Face
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 and based in New York, is best known for its open-source AI platform that powers everything from chatbots to advanced language models. The company hosts popular models like BERT and Stable Diffusion and has become a key player in the AI research community.
The company previously acquired Gradio, a tool for building ML demos, and XetHub, which enables version control for large AI datasets. It also recently introduced LeRobot, a Hugging Face-hosted collection of open-source robotics projects.
Pollen Robotics
Also founded in 2016 and based in Bordeaux, France, Pollen Robotics is the small company behind Reachy’s creation. The founders were previously researchers, focusing on developmental robotics and human-robot interaction at the Flowers AI & CogSci lab at France’s Inria national research institute.
Together with Hugging Face, the companies plan to create robots that understand language, emotion, and context. The goal is to blend large language models with friendly, interactive robots that could work alongside people in real environments.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/Tatiana Shepeleva
