Revolutionizing Household Help: Meet Reachy2, The Open-Source Robot

Reachy2, an open-source robot for household chores. Photo courtesy Hugging Face/Pollen Robotics. Reachy2, produced by the Hugging Face x Pollen Robotics collaboration, is the world’s first open-source robot for household chores. With the participating companies’ expertise in creating human-friendly robots, and enabling pets to live in harmony with them, I am happy to witness the realm of household assistance being taken to a whole new level that only open-source technology can bring about.

THE BIRTH OF A HOUSEHOLD HERO: Reachy2's Journey

Reachy2 is what a robot of the future should look and feel like. Allow me to take you on a journey of what does it take to create such a robot, a robot that was born from open-source methodologies and a passion for making robot technologies more accessible to the general public. Pollen Robotics teamed up with Hugging Face to democratise AI robotics, and make it available to one of the latest generations of technology geeks. A special training approach based on teleoperation and machine learning algorithms has taught Reachy2 to do household activities, ranging from putting cups in a rack to giving an apple to a human in a gesture.

The Power of Open-Source Collaboration

Key to Reachy2’s design is the open-source ideology: a philosophy of sharing knowledge freely in the release of tools to foster innovation. Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics’ partnership exemplifies this approach: by opening up the data set and model used to train Reachy2 on its platform, the companies aren’t only showcasing a robot that mimics human motion, they’re offering it up to the world and inviting others to play around with, replicate and build upon its technology.

OPEN-SOURCE: The Key to Accessible Robotics

Open-sourcing sophisticated robotics such as Reachy2 is a powerful disruption. By giving away a high-end robot such as the Reachy2 free of charge, Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics are also overturning norms in the current robotics market: they are offering a low-cost route to integrating AI in robotics projects, while challenging competitors and incentivising a transition towards more open and collaborative technological development.

Reachy2: A Testament to Ethical Robotics

Ethics are also encoded into Reachy2’s design. Pollen Robotics are clear about their ethical commitments by ensuring that all their technologies are not only open source but also ‘divorced from military funding’. This points to a broader ethos of open-source robotics, which holds out hope that this route to innovation might help to bring ethical concerns back into the heart of tech development.

TRAINING Reachy2: A Blend of Human Ingenuity and AI

The training of Reachy2 is in many ways a story of ingenuity. Using teleoperation and machine learning algorithms, and the careful recording and analysis of millions of actions performed under human control, he was able to follow a series of tasks. In this, there is a symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence, which is needed to make robots increasingly capable of interpreting human environments.

The Global Stage: Open-Source Robotics and Beyond

While Reachy2 is designed to become the robot helper of households, its future will shape the future of so much more than a single home. Built on an open-source platform, Reachy2 is available to robotics hobbyists, coders, and researchers everywhere to take apart and hack. The real goal of collaboration between Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics is to spark a wider culture of open, collegial and accessible technology building.

EMBRACING THE OPEN in Reachy2

Reachy2 was born because it is open; it is open because it was born. Openness is the first step and also the reason that Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics were able to create a robot that ‘opens up’ the possibilities for so many of us. It’s a testament to the beauty of open collaboration, and the urgency of ethical technology. We hope its story is just the beginning.

And for anyone interested in engaging with the vanguard of robotics or improving the future of the technology, companies like EppyBots and its open-source offerings give a story of the future, a story about what can be accomplished by the sharing of knowledge, and about what open, empirical communities can achieve in the world. Reachy2 is not just another robot. It is a story of what the future can look like, if we begin to open our minds, our code, and our communities.