Reachy 2 is touted as a "lab partner for the AI era." The folks at Hugging Face, the open-source artificial intelligence gurus, just jumped into the world of robotics by acquiring Pollen Robotics. And right out of the gate, they are offering the Reachy 2, a super-interesting humanoid robot designed as a "lab partner for the AI era." Ready to dive in and see what all the buzz is about? GET SECURITY ALERTS & EXPERT TECH TIPS – SIGN UP FOR KURT'S'THE CYBERGUY REPORT' NOW So, what makes Reachy 2 stand out?

Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence models and software, announced today that it has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind the bug-eyed, two-armed, humanoid robot called Reachy 2. Hugging Face plans to sell the robot and will also allow developers to download, modify, and suggest improvements to its code. "It's really important for robotics to be as open source as possible," says Clément Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face. "When you think about physical objects doing physical things at work and at home, the level of trust and transparency I need is much higher than for something I chat with on my laptop." Simon Alibert and Rémi Cadene are research engineers in AI and robotics at Hugging Face. In videos shared by Pollen Robotics, Reachy 2 can be seen performing tricks like tidying coffee mugs and picking up fruit.

The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic "avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.