Earlier this year, the open source AI code community and company Hugging Face, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, made waves by announcing the hiring of a former robotics engineer from Tesla’s Optimus program to lead its new effort — an open-source robotics program called “Le Robot.” Today, that engineer, Remi Cadene, of Paris, France, posted on X a video showing what appears to be the first working humanoid robot from Hugging Face’s Le Robot program. Called “Reachy2,” it is actually a humanoid robot designed by Pollen Robotics, another open source robot company based in Bordeaux, France, and which partnered with Hugging Face to train the robot to do a variety of household and safely interact with humans and dogs. In a direct message over X to VentureBeat, Cadene further explained the novel training process behind Reachy2, clarifying the robot was initially “tele-operated” by a human wearing a virtual reality headset, who controlled it through the various chores, including placing cups on a dish rack and handing an apple or other object to a person safely and smoothly. Then, a machine learning algorithm studied 50 videos of the teleoperation sessions in VR, each around 15 seconds long, before learning how to do the various chores on its own and guiding Reachy2 to do them. Each video is associated to a different sensor within the Reachy2 robot.After 40,000 and 60,000 steps of training, Reachy2 learned to rotate and hand and apple and rotate back to its original position.

Full report : Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics show off first project: an open source robot that does chores,