How Hugging Face rebuilt robotics open source in 3 years, from LeRobot to RoboColosseum
DJiafei · x · 2026-11-05
In just 3 years Hugging Face went from a model website to selling robots and helping test them in the real world, single-handedly changing open source culture in robotics:
- Code: LeRobot, a free library to record demos and train policies; 50 demos suffice for a simple pick-and-place, training takes 10 minutes.
- Sharing: Datasets and policies live on the same Hub as language models, so you can start from someone else's run easily.
- Hardware: SO-100 arm ($100), Reachy Mini desktop robot from $299, Microduck at $399 (train in simulation, deploy on real robot).
- Testing: As founding partner of RoboColosseum, 20,000+ runs on real robots in homes, restaurants and sidewalks, with all rollout data open.
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