Hugging Face brings open-source revolution to humanoid robotics with Pollen acquisition

Hugging Face‘s acquisition of Pollen Robotics marks a significant step toward democratizing humanoid robotics through open-source development. By purchasing the company behind the two-armed Reachy 2 robot, Hugging Face is extending the open-source ethos that has accelerated AI progress into the physical robotics domain, potentially addressing the transparency challenges that have plagued recent humanoid robot demonstrations and development.

The big picture: Hugging Face plans to sell Pollen Robotics’ humanoid robot Reachy 2 while making its code openly available for developers to download, modify, and improve upon.

• “It’s really important for robotics to be as open source as possible,” says Clément Delangue, Hugging Face CEO, emphasizing that physical robots demand greater trust and transparency than software-only AI systems.
• The acquisition comes amid growing interest in combining advanced AI models with robotic hardware, with some researchers arguing that AI needs physical embodiment to reach human-level intelligence.

Why this matters: Open-source approaches have accelerated AI development across software and models, but robotics hardware has largely remained the domain of well-funded companies with proprietary systems.

• Making humanoid robotics open-source could potentially accelerate innovation in the field similar to how open AI models like Meta‘s Llama have contributed to rapid progress in language models.
• The approach directly challenges the closed development methodologies of companies like Tesla, Figure, and Agility Robotics that currently dominate the humanoid robotics space.

What they’re saying: Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics executives emphasize transparency as a central benefit of their open-source strategy.

• “When you think about physical objects doing physical things at work and at home, the level of trust and transparency I need is much higher than for something I chat with on my laptop,” explains Delangue.
• “You can’t cheat, you can’t hide with open source,” Delangue notes, addressing concerns about misleading robot demonstration videos from competitors.

Current capabilities: Reachy 2 has been shown performing basic manipulation tasks in demonstrations shared by Pollen Robotics.

• The bug-eyed, two-armed humanoid robot can tidy coffee mugs and pick up fruit, according to videos from the company.
• Several leading AI companies are already using Reachy 2 for robotic manipulation research, according to Matthieu Lapeyre, Pollen Robotics’ cofounder and CEO.

Industry challenges: The humanoid robotics sector faces significant hurdles despite recent investor enthusiasm.

• Lapeyre acknowledges that selling humanoid robots remains challenging due to unclear use cases and reliability issues.
• Experts caution that impressive-looking demonstration videos may be misleading, potentially showing teleoperated systems, single-attempt successes, or robots that can’t reliably complete shown tasks.

The industry trend: Hugging Face’s move aligns with a broader shift toward more open approaches in artificial intelligence development.

• Meta pioneered the release of cutting-edge open weight models with Llama in 2023.
• Even OpenAI, known for its closed approach, announced plans to release a free, open weight model in summer 2024.

Expert perspective: Academic researchers see tangible benefits in open-source robotics development.

• “Making robotics more accessible increases the velocity with which technology advances,” says Sergey Levine, a UC Berkeley assistant professor and cofounder of robotics startup Physical Intelligence.