By Elke Porter | WBN News Global | May 7, 2025

Hugging Face, the company best known for transforming the AI space with its open-source machine learning models, is now venturing boldly into robotics. This week, Hugging Face announced its acquisition of Pollen Robotics, a French startup that has spent nearly a decade building open-source robots — marking Hugging Face’s fifth acquisition.

Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face co-founder and chief scientist, emphasized the company’s vision for robotics: “The next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private.” With this move, Hugging Face aims to put robotics into the hands of everyone, from hobbyists to researchers and enterprises.

Pollen Robotics’ flagship humanoid robot, Reachy 2, is now available under Hugging Face’s umbrella. Designed for research and educational use, Reachy 2 is priced at $70,000 and already active in institutions like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. It features advanced AI capabilities in vision, audio, and motion — all designed for seamless human-robot interaction and teleoperation. As with Hugging Face’s software tools, the robot is fully open-source.

Pollen co-founder Matthieu Lapeyre shared his enthusiasm: “Hugging Face is a natural home for us to grow, as we share a common goal — putting AI and robotics in the hands of everyone.”

This move builds on Hugging Face’s existing robotics library, LeRobot, which marked its first anniversary in April. Led by former Tesla engineer Remi Cadene, LeRobot has quickly become a widely used platform for open robotics development.

With this acquisition, Hugging Face signals its commitment to democratizing robotics just as it has done with AI, by fostering a community-driven, open-source ecosystem that empowers innovation at all levels.

#Hugging Face #Open Source Robotics #Humanoid Robots #AI Innovation #Tech Acquisition #Future Of AI #Pollen Robotics #Robot Assistant #WBN News AI Edition #Elke Porter

Connect with Elke at Westcoast German Media or on LinkedIn: Elke Porter or contact her on WhatsApp:  +1 604 828 8788

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