Reachy Mini
Reachy Mini is a desktop-size expressive robot head and torso from Pollen Robotics, now part of Hugging Face. It is not a walking humanoid, it is the cheapest legitimate way to start building with the open embodied-AI stack that runs on its full-size sibling Reachy 2.
Pollen Robotics press imageThe verdict
$299 for something that is honestly not a humanoid, and the best value on this entire site anyway. It is the cheapest legitimate door into the open embodied-AI stack that runs on machines a hundred times the price, and everything you learn on it transfers.
- Buy it if
- Anyone curious enough to start, at a price that does not require a decision.
- Skip it if
- You expected arms, legs or any physical work at all.
In its favour
- $299 tethered, $449 wireless
- Fully open source
- Same software family as Reachy 2
Against it
- No manipulation
- Desktop toy footprint
- Preorder queue
How the score is built
Capability is what the machine physically does. Value compares it with others at a similar price, not with the whole market. Buyability asks whether you can really order one. Ecosystem is the software and community around it. Proof is what it has done in the field, which is where most humanoids score badly and should.
Similar money, different machine.
- Status
- Commercial
- Category
- education
- First revealed
- 9 July 2025
- Form
- desktop
- Height
- 28 cm
- Weight
- n/a
- Payload
- n/a
- Degrees of freedom
- n/a
- Battery
- n/a
- Runtime
- n/a
- Walking speed
- n/a
- Actuation
- n/a
- Units deployed (est.)
- not disclosed
- Teleoperation
- unknown
What stands out
- $299 tethered, $449 wireless
- Fully open source
- Runs the Hugging Face robotics stack
Hands, sensors, brain
- Compute: Raspberry Pi on the wireless version; host computer on the Lite version
Price and volume
$299 for the tethered Lite version, $449 for the wireless version with battery and on-board compute.
Open source
Hardware and software are open source, built around the Hugging Face robotics stack.
Index position
In the Humanoid Index, which ranks on shipped reality rather than value for money, Reachy Mini sits at #69 of 107 with 31 points: deployment 14/50, autonomy 2/30, availability 15/20. See that method.
Deposits, lead times and warranties: reading a humanoid order sheet
Of 42 buy records, 2 publish a deposit, 1 a warranty, 1 a shipping cost and none a lead time in weeks. The order sheet for a humanoid is mostly blank, and the blanks are where the money goes.
Europe's humanoids: who builds them and what you can order
31 of the 182 humanoids on record come from seven European countries. Three can be ordered, two have a price, and the dearest of those is $75,000 for a robot that does not walk.
How long does a humanoid robot actually run
22 of 182 humanoids on record quote a runtime. The claims run from 1 to 8 hours with a median of 4, and of the 44 machines you can order, 4 say anything at all.
Open-source humanoids: what you can actually build
24 of the 182 humanoids on record call themselves open source. 15 publish hardware files and software, 3 name a licence, 12 can be ordered, and none of the four on preorder has any autonomy evidence yet.
Startups, automakers, universities: who builds humanoids
108 makers, nine kinds. Startups hold 37 of the 44 humanoids you can order. Automakers, universities, big tech, conglomerates and NASA hold 45 robots between them and sell none of them.
44 you can order, 138 you cannot: the gap explained
We keep a record of 182 humanoid robots. Fewer than a quarter of them will sell you one, and of those, only eight tell you the price on their own website. Here is where the rest went.
Other robots by Pollen Robotics.
Sources
- 01Hugging Face's open-source desktop Pollen robot starts at $299Association for Advancing Automation
Price sources
- 01Hugging Face's open-source desktop Pollen robot starts at $299Association for Advancing Automation
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