Earlier this year, in March 2024, the AI developer-focused startup Hugging Face — known for maintaining the largest online repository of open source AI models and code — made waves by poaching Remi Cadene, a former staff scientist at Tesla, Inc., to lead a new open source robotics project. The news was notable not only because Tesla is such an established name in tech and robotics — it’s recently been pursuing the development of a humanoid robot model called Optimus — but because in general, the entire field of robotics has been supercharged and radically advanced in recent months by the addition of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) and generative AI more broadly, two subjects Hugging Face already specialized in. Now, today, we are getting our first taste of what Hugging Face’s open source robot vision looks like: the company has announced its new initiative, LeRobot—an open-source toolkit designed to democratize AI robotics and inspire a new generation of roboticists, available now on Github. “The next step of AI development is its application to our physical world,” posted Cadene in a long thread of messages from his personal account on X (formerly Twitter). “Thus, we are building a community-driven effort around AI for robotics, and it’s open to everyone!” Cadene also posted a link to a free Discord chat server for those interested in joining, leveraging the open source code, and discussing the LeRobot initiative. LeRobot serves as a robust framework akin to the “Transformers” for robotics. This toolkit is not just a software package but a comprehensive platform that includes a versatile library for sharing, visualizing data, and training state-of-the-art models. Users can also access a plethora of pretrained models to jumpstart their projects. Additionally, LeRobot integrates seamlessly with physics simulators, which allows enthusiasts and developers without physical robotics hardware to simulate and test their AI models in a virtual environment.

Full report : Hugging Face launches LeRobot, an open-source robotics code library, after hiring Tesla scientist Remi Cadene to lead a new open-source robotics project.