Last year at the start of the French CES, Pollen Robotics impressed Reachy, an open source robot (the top half of at least one) that was capable of performing a wide variety of tasks – from traditional R&D to product demonstrations and food service. This year, Reachy is back and more capable than ever. Instead of a program in Reachy gestures, users can now take control of the robot just by tapping a VR headset.
Once fixed to Reachy, the user can see what the robot is seeing through its front-facing cameras and control the robot’s arms through VR controllers to, say, a game of tic-tac-toe to play on the CES showroom. This technique can also be used to train Reachy quickly for delicate tasks that require fine motor control, rather than programming those movements manually. The company has reportedly updated Reachy’s cameras and processor from last year, though Reachy will still return you around $ 17,000.