Reachy Mini, by Pollen Robotics.
An open-source, expressive robot built for AI experimentation. Compact enough for a desk, capable enough for a real project, transparent enough for a student to actually learn from.
Why this hardware
The Reachy Mini is not the cheapest robot a program could send a student. It is the platform we selected because of what it lets a student actually do. Three reasons in particular:
- It is a real platform, not a kit. Programs come and go, but the Reachy Mini comes from a research lab that builds the larger Reachy humanoid used in academic robotics. The same languages, the same libraries, the same modes of thinking carry forward.
- It is open source. A scholar can read the code. Can modify it. Can fix something themselves and contribute the fix back. This is the working model of real engineering, not a sealed black box that exists to be obeyed.
- It is expressive. Nine degrees of freedom and an animated head mean the robot can do social, perceptual, and motion-based projects in ways that a wheeled chassis cannot. Students gravitate toward problems they can see the robot reacting to.
Meet Aiden and Rose
The Initiative operates two Reachy Minis of its own. Aiden and Rose travel with Dr. Finley to school visits and talks, where students watch a robot's personality, written in plain English in an ordinary text file, get rewritten in real time. They are the same hardware every scholar receives, so everything a student sees Aiden and Rose do in a demonstration is something that student could build at home.
What a scholar can build
The Reachy Mini's hardware envelope is large enough that the limit is the scholar's imagination, not the platform. Example projects scholars might attempt:
- A vision pipeline that recognizes the scholar's family members and greets them differently.
- A spoken-dialogue agent built on a small local language model.
- An accessibility assistant that reads on-screen text aloud and responds to voice commands.
- A musical performance piece using head motion synchronized to audio.
- A research replication: reproducing a published robotics or HRI paper at the Mini's scale.
For parents and counselors
We expect parents and school counselors to evaluate the program before students apply. A few specifics worth knowing:
- The robot has a camera and microphone. The student controls when these are active. The Initiative does not receive or store any audio or video from any scholar's robot. There is no remote management.
- The robot connects to the internet only when the student configures it to. Standalone operation is fully supported.
- Mentorship sessions are conducted in groups, by video call, with adults present. One-on-one contact between an individual mentor and an individual scholar is by request of the family only and is opt-in.
- The hardware is the scholar's property. Once shipped, it does not return to us.