Last year at the French CES company Pollen Robotics, Reachy debuted, an open-source humanoid robot (the upper half of one) capable of performing a wide range of tasks – from traditional R&D to product demonstrations and food service . This year, Reachy is back and more capable than ever before. Instead of programming in Reachy’s movements, users can now control the robot directly by simply putting on a VR headset.
Once connected to Reachy, the user can see what the robot is seeing through its front cameras and control the robot’s arms via VR controllers to, for example, play a tic-tac-toe game on the CES show floor play. This method can also be used to quickly train Reachy for delicate tasks that require fine motor control, rather than programming these movements manually. The company also reportedly upgraded Reachy’s cameras and processor since last year, though Reachy will still refund you about $ 17,000.