3,000 Reachy Minis Begin Global Rollout as Hugging Face Ships Early Kits

• Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue announced that 3,000 Reachy Mini units are now shipping globally.
• The robot is shipping in a bare-bones, DIY state aimed at AI builders, with open-source tools and community support.

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics are scaling up the launch of Reachy Mini, an open-source AI robot designed for experimentation and creative development. In a LinkedIn post, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue shared that 3,000 units are now shipping globally. Delangue said, "To my knowledge, it’s one of the largest shipments of AI robots of the year (or ever?) right on time for Christmas."

Launched in July of this year, Reachy Mini is a desktop-sized, programmable robot built for developers, educators, and creative coders. Sold as a self-assembly kit, it includes a motorized head, animated antennas, and sensors for multimodal interaction, such as a camera, microphones, and a speaker. It runs open-source models for speech, vision, and personality via Hugging Face integration, and supports real-world and virtual development through a simulator and code library.

The first version, aimed at AI builders, shipped with minimal pre-installed software. Delangue noted that Reachy Mini is currently “much more of an open-source, DIY robotics platform than a polished consumer robot” and that "like most early hardware, it will likely have a fair number of bugs and quirks." Despite its early stage, community members have already begun hacking together creative applications and contributing improvements using the available simulator. Buyers not in this batch can expect delivery within 90 days, and development can start immediately using the simulator and open-source tools available on GitHub.

🌀 Tom’s Take:

The Reachy Mini rollout is a turning point for open, builder-driven robotics. A global wave of developers now has a physical platform to push AI experimentation into the real world.

Source: Clem Delangue (LinkedIn)