Pollen Robotics — open-source humanoid robots for embodied AI
Pollen Robotics is a Bordeaux, France-headquartered robotics company building open-source humanoid robots for embodied AI research and human-robot interaction. With Reachy 2 — its 2024/2025 flagship upper-body humanoid — and its April 2025 acquisition by Hugging Face, Pollen sits at the research-lab edge of the current humanoid robotics and AI boom, alongside open-hardware peers such as K-Scale Labs and OpenBB Robotics.
- 2016Founded
- Bordeaux, FRHeadquarters
- Reachy 2Latest flagship (2024/25)
- ~€2.5M pre-exitFunding raised
- FranceCountry
- Hugging Face subStatus
About Pollen Robotics
Pollen Robotics SAS was founded in May 2016 in Bordeaux, France by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, two former researchers from the Flowers team at INRIA, the French national research institute for computer science. Both founders held doctorates in robotics and artificial intelligence, and before starting the company they had co-created the open-source Poppy Project — an academic humanoid platform that pioneered the idea of combining 3D-printed structural parts with off-the-shelf servo actuators and fully open hardware and software licensing. Pollen was created to carry that same open philosophy into a commercially supported product.
The company's flagship program has been Reachy, an upper-body humanoid robot designed from the outset for human-robot interaction, teleoperation, and machine-learning research rather than heavy factory work. The first-generation Reachy shipped in 2020, and a substantial second generation — Reachy 2 — was unveiled in 2024 and began shipping to customers in 2025. Reachy 2 has been recognized in the international robotics community: Pollen finished second at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals in 2022, and the platform has been adopted by embodied-AI research groups at universities including Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.
Pollen's funding profile stayed deliberately small relative to the venture-heavy US humanoid landscape. Public filings indicate approximately EUR 2.5 million (roughly USD 2.8 million) in cumulative venture funding prior to exit, including a EUR 2.4 million round announced in 2023 with backers such as Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale Group. On 14 April 2025, Hugging Face, Inc. — the open-source AI platform valued in the billions and best known for the Transformers library and the Hugging Face Hub — announced the acquisition of Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed sum. It was Hugging Face's first move into hardware, and Reachy 2 was designated the reference hardware platform for its LeRobot open-source robot-learning library.
The team, small by US humanoid standards at roughly 20-30 people leading up to acquisition, is weighted heavily toward robotics and machine-learning engineers. Post-acquisition, Pollen continues to operate from Bordeaux under the Hugging Face umbrella, with a mandate to keep Reachy's hardware designs, firmware, and SDK openly licensed. The broader competitive field of open, research-grade humanoids remains small — direct peers include K-Scale Labs and OpenBB Robotics — while the closed commercial humanoid space (Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, Agility, Boston Dynamics) pursues a different customer entirely: high-volume industrial deployment rather than embodied-AI research platforms.
Product lineup: Reachy, Reachy 2, and the Orbita actuator
Pollen Robotics has taken a slower, research-driven cadence than the venture-backed US humanoid pack. Each Reachy generation is characterized less by revolutionary redesigns and more by careful iteration on the same open-hardware core: modular arms, expressive head, Python SDK, and full CAD/firmware release. The 2024/2025 Reachy 2 represents a substantial upgrade centered on the patented Orbita 3D parallel actuator and a completely re-engineered arm.
Reachy 1 (2020) — the open-source original
Reachy 1 launched in 2020 as an upper-body humanoid with two 7-DoF arms, an expressive Orbita 3D-actuated neck, animated antennas, and stereo cameras in a mobile head. The platform used Dynamixel servo motors, ROS integration, and Python/VR teleoperation. It was priced by configuration between roughly EUR 9,990 and EUR 39,990 and used in research, retail-pilot, telepresence, and hospitality settings across Europe and North America.
Reachy 2 (2024/2025) — the embodied-AI flagship
Reachy 2 is a full mechanical redesign. The arms are now bio-inspired 7-DoF assemblies matching adult-human proportions and reach, each capable of a 3 kg payload. The head and wrists use patented Orbita 3D parallel actuators designed and manufactured in-house. Reachy 2 ships in four configurations — dual-arm mobile, single-arm mobile, dual-arm stationary, and single-arm stationary — priced from approximately USD 70,000 to USD 78,000, and it is distributed globally via the Hugging Face store as well as through Pollen's authorized channel partners.
Orbita actuators — Pollen's core IP
Orbita is Pollen's patented 3-DoF parallel actuator that packages three coordinated brushless motors into a single spherical joint. It powers the Reachy 2 neck, wrists, and is offered as a component product for other robot builders. Because Orbita is a compact, high-torque, three-axis joint, it is central to Reachy 2's ability to perform natural, human-like head and wrist motion at low latency — a key requirement for VR teleoperation.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery/Runtime | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reachy 1 | 2020 | Modular | ~20 kg (torso) | ~0.5 kg/arm | Wall/DC | Dynamixel + Orbita neck | Open-source upper-body; €9,990–€39,990 |
| Reachy 2 | 2024/25 | 136–166 cm | 32–50 kg | ~3 kg/arm | ~8–10 hr (LiFePO4) | Bio-inspired + Orbita 3D | Hugging Face flagship; ~$70K–$78K |
| Orbita 3D | 2020+ | — | — | — | — | 3× BLDC parallel | Patented spherical joint; sold to OEMs |
Technology stack
Pollen's platform is an unusual mix in the humanoid landscape: a fully open-source hardware and software stack, engineered at production quality, with a research-grade sensor and compute payload. The company has published Reachy's CAD, firmware, and SDK under permissive licenses (Apache 2.0 and CC-BY-SA), and post-acquisition that openness is a strategic pillar of the Hugging Face LeRobot library.
Perception
Reachy 2's head carries a dual-camera stereo module built around IMX296 global-shutter sensors, plus a Luxonis OAK-FFC Time-of-Flight module for depth measurement in the 0.2 to 5 meter range. The torso adds an Orbbec Gemini 336 RGB-D camera for close-range manipulation depth. On the optional mobile base, an RPLIDAR S2 scans a 30-meter radius at 32,000 measurements per second, complemented by wheel IMUs, Hall-effect sensors, and antenna-mounted lavalier microphones for immersive telepresence audio.
Control model and LeRobot
Reachy 2 runs ROS 2 with a Python SDK, gRPC clients, and a Unity-based VR teleoperation application delivering roughly 125 ms glass-to-glass latency. After the Hugging Face acquisition, Reachy 2 became the reference hardware for LeRobot, Hugging Face's open library for robot learning — a stack that includes imitation-learning policies, VLA models, and a shared dataset format on the Hugging Face Hub. This makes Reachy 2 one of the few commercial humanoids explicitly designed to be trained and shared like a foundation model.
Actuators, power, and compute
Reachy 2 uses a mix of Dynamixel smart servos in the arms, patented Orbita 3D parallel actuators in the neck and wrists, and Maxon brushless DC motors in select joints. The optional mobile base is powered by a 24V LiFePO4 pack (approximately 35 Ah) with an integrated battery management system, delivering roughly 8 to 10 hours of continuous operation. The onboard compute is a Solidrun Bedrock v3000 control unit paired with an internal Intel NUC and an embedded Google Coral TPU for low-latency on-robot ML inference; heavier training workloads are offloaded to external GPU hardware over Ethernet or Wi-Fi.
Even at Pollen's research-scale volumes, the electronics BOM is demanding. Every Orbita joint's servo controller needs high-efficiency motor-driver stages — increasingly built around wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) — and each driver requires tightly matched precision passives on the gate-drive and current-sense channels. The LiFePO4 pack in the mobile base integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs, and precision MLCC capacitors line every power rail on the compute, camera, and Coral TPU boards. In a low-volume, long-life research product, the reliability and long-term availability of these components matter as much as peak specifications.
Applications and deployments
Pollen has intentionally positioned Reachy as a research and embodied-AI platform rather than a factory-floor humanoid. Under Hugging Face, that positioning has sharpened: Reachy 2 is the reference body for LeRobot and the go-to open humanoid for university and industrial-research groups working on imitation learning, VLA models, and dexterous manipulation.
- Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University. Both institutions have deployed Reachy 2 for embodied-AI research, including manipulation, human-robot interaction, and multi-modal learning studies. These are among the most-cited early third-party deployments of the platform.
- Hugging Face LeRobot ecosystem. Reachy 2 is the reference hardware for Hugging Face's LeRobot open-source library. Researchers can train policies against Reachy 2 and share model weights and datasets directly on the Hugging Face Hub.
- Retail, hospitality, and telepresence pilots. Previous-generation Reachy robots have been used in French and international pilots covering retail assistance, hospitality demos, and remote-avatar telepresence — including Pollen's award-winning entry at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals.
- OEM Orbita adoption. Pollen also sells its patented Orbita 3D actuator as a component to other robot builders, extending the company's technology reach beyond the Reachy chassis itself.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Reachy-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, Dynamixel and Maxon servo modules, IMUs and Hall-effect sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU and TPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume research-grade production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, TPU accelerators, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older Reachy-class and research platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU/TPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Pollen Robotics?
Pollen Robotics was founded in Bordeaux, France in May 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, two former INRIA researchers from the Flowers team who previously co-created the open-source Poppy Project. Lapeyre served as CEO and Rouanet as CTO from founding through the company's acquisition by Hugging Face in April 2025.
What is Reachy 2?
Reachy 2 is Pollen Robotics' second-generation open-source upper-body humanoid robot, launched in 2024 and shipping to customers in 2025. It features dual 7-DoF bio-inspired arms, patented Orbita 3D parallel actuators in the neck and wrists, VR teleoperation with roughly 125 ms glass-to-glass latency, and an optional omnidirectional mobile base with LiDAR. Starting price is approximately USD 70,000, and it is distributed globally via the Hugging Face store.
Where are Pollen Robotics Reachy robots deployed?
Reachy 2 is used as an embodied-AI and human-robot interaction research platform at institutions including Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University, and is the reference hardware for the Hugging Face LeRobot open-source library. Earlier Reachy generations have also been deployed in retail, hospitality, and telepresence pilots, and the platform finished second at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals in 2022.
How much has Pollen Robotics raised?
Prior to acquisition, Pollen Robotics had raised approximately EUR 2.5 million (roughly USD 2.8 million) in cumulative venture funding, including a EUR 2.4 million round in 2023 with backers such as Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale Group. Hugging Face, Inc. acquired Pollen Robotics on 14 April 2025 for an undisclosed amount; it was Hugging Face's first hardware acquisition.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Pollen Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Pollen Robotics or Hugging Face. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Pollen Robotics®, Reachy, Reachy 2, and Orbita are trademarks of Pollen Robotics SAS (a subsidiary of Hugging Face, Inc.). Hugging Face® is a trademark of Hugging Face, Inc. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Pollen Robotics SAS or Hugging Face, Inc. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.