Hugging Face is renowned for machine learning and AI development but is now involved in robotics. This week, it revealed two new robots for the market:

• HopeJR: It has up to 66 actuated degrees of freedom, can walk and manipulate objects, looks accessible with an "Futurama"-like appearance (especially the eyes), is co-designed with The Robot Studio and is open source, aiming to make robotics accessible and not dominated by a few big players. It will be sold for around $3,000.
• Reachy Mini: It looks like a cute Wall-E-esque statue bust that can turn its head and talk to the user, is used to test AI applications and costs between $250 and $300.

Hugging Face has previously released AI models for robots and a 3D-printable robotic arm. It also acquired Pollen Robotics. For context, Tesla's Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot is expected to cost at least $20,000. There is significant investment in robotics but there are barriers like battery life (Unitree's G1 runs for about 2 hours on a single charge).