Are Open Source Robots The Way?

Hey Robot fans,

This week brought some very exciting news from the open source community, plus we’ve rounded up some robot videos from around the web.

Hot Damn! A $3,000 Humanoid Robot!

If you're new here, we've been obsessed with humanoid robots ever since we first laid eyes on Unitree’s $16,000 G1. That model is basically a high-end toy. The Unitree H1, which can actually do real work, is closer to $90,000. Tesla has teased its upcoming Optimus robot at $20–30k—but you can’t buy it yet.

The punchline? Robots are expensive.

So when we hear $3,000, we get excited. Check out the tweet from Hugging Face below:

The story was first reported by Tech Crunch (or at least that’s where I heard it first), and it caught my interest immediately. The story got weirder and more interesting as I dug deeper. First let’s start with Hugging Face.

🤗 Quick Aside: Who is Hugging Face?

Hugging Face is “The AI community building the future.” It’s a for-profit company that is promoting open source technology, mostly for AI, but since robotics technology leverages AI heavily, there’s also a lot of robotics work.

Hugging face (according to their last valuation) is worth $4.5 billion! It’s not a small company. The company recently acquired Pollen robotics, which is a sign of their investment in robotics.

💡Concept Behind the Robot

Here’s the details on the Hugging Face robot. It is called HopeJr, it costs $3,000… that’s it. There is no sales page, no preorder link, or a coming soon splash page.

Hugging Face’s concept is that you will buy all the parts yourself and that bill of materials will cost around $3k. Then you will download the open source software yourself, and build the robot at home.

Think IKEA for advanced robotics.

This is very cool, and an exciting innovation, but it’s pretty far away from reality. Comments on the X thread were mostly about things that are ‘coming soon’ but not available yet.

🤔 Our Take

Hugging Face is clearly innovating and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We love this. However there’s a lot to be desired about this ‘launch’. We are ready to signup for a pre-order, but where do we do that? Most of us want a robot we can buy at Target.

🎥 Video Corner

This section is where we round up the best robot vids from around the web.

Until next time.

The future is bright,
Ferol

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