Spaces:
Running
Running
| title: Howdy Friend | |
| emoji: 👋 | |
| colorFrom: yellow | |
| colorTo: green | |
| sdk: static | |
| pinned: false | |
| hf_oauth: true | |
| short_description: Reachy tracks your face and gets happy when you wave. | |
| tags: | |
| - reachy_mini | |
| - reachy_mini_js_app | |
| # Howdy Friend | |
| Reachy Mini watches its camera, keeps its head (and body) pointed at the nearest face, gives a quick nod and chirp when it first notices you, and plays a happy clip from the Reachy Mini emotions library when you wave at it. | |
| Everything runs in the browser. The robot only streams video and receives motion commands over WebRTC, so this works on a Wireless Reachy Mini without loading the onboard computer. | |
| ## How it works | |
| - **Face tracking**: MediaPipe Face Detector runs on the robot's video stream in the browser. The largest face drives a smoothed proportional controller on head yaw and pitch, sent with `setTarget()` at ~15 Hz. If the face drifts far to the side, the body turns to follow so the head never hits its yaw limit. | |
| - **Wave detection**: MediaPipe Hand Landmarker finds an open hand. The wrist's horizontal position is tracked over a 1.2 s window; two or more direction reversals with enough travel counts as a wave. A 5 s cooldown prevents double triggers. | |
| - **Reactions**: On first sight of a face, a short synthesized nod + chirp. On a wave, a random clip from a curated happy set in `pollen-robotics/reachy-mini-emotions-library`, played daemon-side with `playMove()` so motion and audio stay in sync. The clip is shifted by the current body yaw so the robot keeps facing you during the reaction. | |
| ## Deploying | |
| No build step. Push these files to the Space: | |
| ``` | |
| git init -b main | |
| git remote add space https://huggingface.co/spaces/RickDakan/howdy_friend | |
| git add -A && git commit -m "feat: howdy friend" | |
| git push -u space main | |
| ``` | |
| Open the Space URL, sign in with Hugging Face, pick your robot. | |
| ## Tuning | |
| Constants at the top of `app.js`: tracking gain, deadband, smoothing, body-follow threshold, wave sensitivity, cooldowns, and the list of reaction clips. Sign conventions for yaw/pitch are noted there in case your camera mount differs. | |