Monday, March 18, 2024

Meet Reachy, an expressive, open-source humanoid system

This is Reachy, a very expressive and open-source robot developed by the French company Pollen Robotics. The robot was presented during CES this year.

Obviously, among the pros of the robot, the fact that it is based on an open-source platform capable of learning more and more. At the moment, the robot has already shown its ability with simple games, but developers can use Python to create countless applications for the system. The modular nature of the robot allows an unlimited number of applications: use within the restaurant, customer service, demonstrations is possible, and it can also be dedicated to research and development sectors.

Humanoid arm made for object manipulation.
Humanoid arm made for object manipulation.

Reachy works with Luos and comes in modular parts that you can combine according to your needs. The system comes with integrated artificial intelligence, which should help developers facilitate the development of various apps.

Reachy’s arms have 7 degrees of freedom of movement and can be equipped with various manipulators to simulate a five-fingered hand grip. It can manipulate up to 500-gram object.

An expressive head for interaction

An expressive head for interaction
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“The head is animated by Orbita, a unique technology developed by Pollen Robotics’ R&D team. This ball joint actuator allows unpreceded dynamic and multi-directional movement. With animated antennas, Reachy can convey many emotions to his audience (happy, sad, excited…),” the company explains on their website.

In the video above, you can see it in more detail, although there is something they do not say there: The basic version of single-arm costs about $9,000, while the upper version of the double arm and a head costs about $17,000. This confirms that the robot is intended for professional use. Its price puts it out of reach of the budgets of robot enthusiasts.