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The new Reachy Mini robot can let kids turn play into innovation

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Your open-source companion - Reachy Mini

The Reachy Mini is an exciting new desktop robot aimed primarily at developers, educators, students, and enthusiasts, or basically anyone interested in creative coding.

There are actually two of them — Reachy Mini Lite ($299) and Reachy Mini Wireless ($449) — and both were developed by the prominent AI platform Hugging Face following its recent acquisition of Pollen Robotics. 

The two teams collaborated to make the robot a reality, with Pollen Robotics combining its know-how in open-source robotics with Hugging Face’s community-driven approach.

Impressively, the robot secured $500,000 worth of sales in only its first 24 hours of going live last week.

The cute-looking robot measures about 11 inches (28 cm) tall, 6.3 inches (16 cm) wide, and weighs around 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg), ensuring a decent fit for most desktops or tables.

The more affordable of the two versions, Reachy Mini Lite, connects to Mac or Linux computers (Windows support is on the way), and for this version shipping is expected to begin toward the end of this summer.

The pricier Reachy Mini Wireless, on the other hand, comes with a Raspberry Pi 5, built-in Wi-Fi, and a battery, and will start shipping in batches from late 2025 through 2026.

Once you’ve assembled it, you can have some instant fun by getting Reachy Mini to show off its 15 pre-installed demonstrations and behaviors, among them facial recognition, hand tracking, antenna movements, voice-activated AI conversations, and object manipulation with its arm and gripper — eliminating the need for you to code from scratch.

The fact that it comes with pre-installed demos and a user-friendly setup means that beginners and hobbyists can also use it, especially for educational and exploratory endeavors. 

But the particularly cool part is that it integrates with the Hugging Face Hub, giving you instant access to numerous AI models and datasets that you can work with to make the robot even more useful and engaging.

While so many companion robots — Jibo and Anki’s Cozmo and Vector come to mind — have fallen short over the years in terms of capability and affordability, it’s the community aspect of the Reachy Mini that makes this particular effort so tantalizing.  

Indeed, the open-source approach means that it’s built for collaboration, and supported by a large and active developer and AI community.

It means that there are numerous people out there who can, if they wish, build new features for Reachy Mini, all the time boosting its functionality. And it’s this community-driven model that gives it a better chance of succeeding where past robots flopped.

Even better, the combination of cuteness and potential could really help to inspire a new generation of kids to get interested in robotics and AI, sparking their imagination and making advanced tech like this feel less intimidating and instead far more approachable.

Interested in getting one? The Reachy Mini is available now for preorder.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
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