Reachy Mini is a kit for a compact, open-source robot designed explicitly for AI experimentation and human interaction. The kit is available from Hugging Face, which is itself a repository and hosting service for machine learning models. Reachy seems to be one of their efforts at branching out from pure software.
Reachy Mini is intended as a development platform, allowing people to make and share models for different behaviors, hence the Hugging Face integration to make that easier. On the inside of the full version is a Raspberry Pi, and we suspect some form of Stewart Platform is responsible for the movement of the head. There’s also a cheaper (299 USD) “lite” version intended for tethered use, and a planned simulator to allow development and testing without access to a physical Reachy at all.
Reachy has a distinctive head and face, so if you’re thinking it looks familiar that’s probably because we first covered Reachy the humanoid robot as a project from Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025.)
The idea behind the smaller Reachy Mini seems to be to provide a platform to experiment with expressive human communication via cameras and audio, rather than to be the kind of robot that moves around and manipulates objects.
It’s still early in the project, so if you want to know more you can find a bit more information about Reachy Mini at Pollen’s site and you can see Reachy Mini move in a short video, embedded just below.
Totally stealing those cute kinematics.
An up front link to the open source stuff for this robot would be neat to have
“expressive human communication” like? mouthless communication ?
Yes. You do it all the time. You’re doing it now.
The sideways head bob in the GIF reminds me of the Crafsman (steady craftin’)
I don’t know if the antennæ are functional or just for looks, but they seem too long, slightly dangerous, and out of place with the rest of the æsthetic. I think a couple of stubby, white rubber ducks – with optional RGB LEDs in the tips – would work much better.
Ironic that they named it Reachy despite not having any arms
That’s not a robot, that’s a surveillance camera with a face painted on…
Physical model and the PCB aren’t open source.
The guessed steward platform is likely a miniaturized version of their “orbita(R) joint” on the larger model (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSL39WFxCLE)
I absolutely love this. I designed something (physically) similar that has never left the pages of my notebooks. It’s really wonderful to see someone with a similar idea bring it to fruition. I like that there’s room in the robotics space to span between anthropomorphized and the far counter-description.