Pollen Robotics
Pollen Robotics builds expressive, interactive and open-source robots for AI builders, researchers and makers. Its stated mission is to advance useful robotics that benefit society and make AI robotics practical, accessible and user-friendly.
At a Glance
- Academic and industrial AI/robotics research labs
- Universities and education
- AI developers and makers
- Healthcare and service-robotics prototyping
- +2 more
AI Tools by Pollen Robotics
(1)
Microduck
Open Source Biped Robot Platform
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Latest News
Pollen published 'A galaxy in your palm,' a deep dive into a year of Reachy Mini software, apps and the one-click app ecosystem.
Pollen published 'One Protocol to Move Them All,' detailing Reachy Mini's WebRTC audio, video and motor-control stack.
Pollen announced the next JavaScript SDK chapter for Reachy Mini apps.
Microduck pre-orders opened at $399; the 25 cm open-source biped includes a sim-to-real RL workflow and retrainable policies.
Products & Services
Open-source, human-scale bimanual humanoid/mobile manipulator for embodied-AI research and robotics labs. It supports VR teleoperation and Python control, ROS 2, 7-DoF arms, Orbita joints, stereo/RGB-D vision, LiDAR and an omnidirectional mobile base; each arm can lift about 3 kg.
Open-source expressive companion robot for human interaction, creative coding and AI experimentation. It is sold as DIY Wireless and Lite variants, with camera, four microphones, speaker, expressive motion, a Python/JavaScript SDK and a community app ecosystem.
A 25 cm, 15-motor open-source bipedal duck robot designed for reinforcement-learning experimentation. It includes a simulated twin, onboard policy loop, camera, LiDAR and two IMUs; users can retrain policies in simulation and deploy them on the robot. Its full software and RL training stack are Apache-2.0 licensed on GitHub.
Pioneering 3D-printed open-source humanoid robot that preceded and informed Pollen Robotics' commercial platforms.
Market Position
Pollen positions itself as an open, modular and accessible alternative to proprietary humanoid and service-robot platforms. Reachy 2 differentiates through open hardware/software, Python and ROS control, VR teleoperation, expressive Orbita joints and a research-ready mobile manipulator; Reachy Mini and Microduck extend that approach to lower-cost makers and AI builders. Relevant competitive alternatives include closed or less accessible humanoid/service-robot platforms such as SoftBank Robotics' Pepper, PAL Robotics' TIAGo, and research platforms from Boston Dynamics and Unitree.
Leadership
Founders
Matthieu Lapeyre
Former developmental-robotics researcher at Inria's Flowers team; co-created the Poppy 3D-printed open-source humanoid robot and was Pollen's co-founder and CEO before becoming Head of Robotics Product & Hardware after the Hugging Face acquisition.
Pierre Rouanet
Former developmental-robotics researcher at Inria's Flowers team; co-founder and software CTO of Pollen Robotics. He collaborated with Matthieu Lapeyre for more than a decade on practical, accessible robotics, including Poppy.
Executive Team
Matthieu Lapeyre
Head of Robotics Product & Hardware; Pollen co-founder
Former Inria Flowers-team developmental-robotics researcher and former Pollen co-founder/CEO; co-created Poppy and leads robotics product and hardware work.
Pierre Rouanet
Co-founder and CTO (Software)
Former Inria Flowers-team developmental-robotics researcher and long-time collaborator of Lapeyre; leads the company's software engineering heritage.
Founding Story
Pollen Robotics began in 2016 when former Inria Flowers-team researchers Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet turned their long-running collaboration and work on Poppy into a company. Their initial vision was to make robots practical and accessible, with open source at the core and robots serving as useful interfaces between people and technology.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Hardware sales of robots and accessories, together with paid robotics projects/services and commercial research-platform sales; software and hardware are otherwise strongly open-source. The company said it operated for its first seven years primarily on revenue from sales.
Pricing Tiers
USB DIY kit using the customer's Mac, PC or Linux machine for compute; includes camera, four microphones and speaker.
Standalone DIY kit with Raspberry Pi CM4, Wi-Fi and USB, camera, four microphones and speaker.
Research robot available to order by contacting sales; configurations include stationary or omnidirectional mobile base and single- or dual-arm variants.
Introductory pre-order price; robot includes battery, USB-C cable and game controller.
Spare motors and cables, batteries, dual charger, NFC tags, Hugging Face credit, screwdriver and screws.
Dual charger and two spare batteries.
Laser pointer, NFC polaroid, rollers, ball and NFC tags.
Target Markets
- Academic and industrial AI/robotics research labs
- Universities and education
- AI developers and makers
- Healthcare and service-robotics prototyping
- Retail and real-world manipulation applications
- Open-source robotics and reinforcement-learning communities
- AI and robotics research
- Embodied-AI and machine-learning experiments
- Human-robot interaction and social robotics
- Object manipulation and real-world task prototyping
- VR telepresence and remote operation
- Education and developer training
- Cornell University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Accenture
- CEA