Sprout steps in a softer smarter robot built for human spaces

• Sprout is a lightweight, soft-bodied humanoid platform shipping today as a Creator Edition for use in shared human spaces.
• Early users include Disney, Boston Dynamics, and NYU, with applications spanning retail, entertainment, and home services.

Fauna Robotics came out of stealth with Sprout, a 3.5-foot humanoid designed for developers building real-world robotics applications. Lightweight and interactive, Sprout breaks from the industrial mold with a focus on safety, usability, and developer access. Early adopters include Disney, UC San Diego, and Boston Dynamics.

"We started Fauna with a simple premise: robots belong around people," said Rob Cochran, Co-founder and CEO of Fauna Robotics, formerly of CTRL-labs, in a news release. "To date, robotics efforts have delivered heavy machinery poorly suited to working alongside people, in the places we spend the most time. Sprout is different. It is a canvas for developers—designed from first principles with safety in mind, so creators can focus on what excites them rather than building hardware and core software from scratch."

Sprout is designed to operate in settings like homes, classrooms, studios, and retail environments. It weighs 22.7 kg and features a soft exterior, compliant motor controls, and time-of-flight sensors for obstacle avoidance. It can walk, kneel, crawl, and sit, and is equipped for natural voice interaction, allowing developers to direct tasks or navigation by speech. Sprout also expresses emotion through articulated eyebrows, LED facial displays, and body language, all within an ergonomic form factor built for human environments.

Developers get a full SDK, modular AI stack, pretrained motion policies, and integrated autonomy out of the box. These tools make it possible to build production-ready applications in weeks, not years, according to the company. Sprout is built and supported entirely in the U.S., and is available now to researchers, educators, and commercial teams.

🌀 Tom’s Take:

A developer-focused robot matters because it shifts the bottleneck from building hardware to building applications, opening the door to real-world use, not just research demos.

Source: Fauna Robotics