Fauna Robotics Launches Sprout: The Easiest Way to Build with Humanoids

NEW YORK—January 27, 2026—Fauna Robotics today launches out of stealth with its debut robot, Sprout. Shipping today as a Creator Edition, Sprout is a friendly and capable humanoid platform for developers and researchers. Standing 3.5 feet tall, Sprout is engineered for use in human environments and built with safety at its core. The product launch comes at a moment when the humanoid field still lacks a robotics product that is safe around people, interactive, and accessible to developers. Sprout is already in use at several of the world’s largest companies who are exploring applications across retail, entertainment, home services, and other people-friendly spaces. Customers include Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU, among others.

Despite advances in hardware, AI, and robotics research, it is still rare to see a humanoid outside a lab or a video demo. The obstacles preventing real deployments in robotics include:

• Lack of simple, practical developer platforms with US-based customer support
• Industrial, overpowered designs instead of safety-first hardware
• Robots that lack the features and personality to operate comfortably in human spaces

Fauna’s Sprout provides a safe, friendly platform for anyone, from advanced robotics researchers to first-time developers, to create real deployments, not just demos. 

Developer Platform 

Developers don’t have many options for deploying robotics applications. Most existing platforms require stitching together numerous third-party libraries just to get started. Even experts struggle. Technical teams are forced to share a single fragile robot and compete for limited access. Meanwhile, independent developers and smaller teams who simply want to design an expressive character or teach a robot to guide customers through a store are left solving far too much of the underlying robotics stack on their own. Because most existing platforms are built in China, developers outside of Asia face additional complexity; customer service is often outsourced to third parties, with limited English-language support and coverage in inconvenient timezones. Until now, there has never been a general-purpose humanoid platform that abstracts away the complexity of robotics and lets anyone begin building human-centric applications out-of-the box.

Sprout makes advanced robotics accessible by delivering an all inclusive platform. It is fully equipped with an SDK that allows developers to get started building real applications within minutes, not months. Sprout equips developers and researchers with tools for mobile manipulation, long horizon reasoning, multi-robot collaboration, character creation, and human-robot interaction, including:

• Modular AI-platform architecture rather than a monolithic system, allowing teams to incorporate their own models anywhere in the stack, matching how developers actually work
• Learned locomotion behaviors that enable the robot to walk, crawl, lean, squat, sit and stand, and get up from and down to the ground
• A mapping pipeline for creating a 3D map of the environment, a service for localizing within the map, and an autonomous navigation service that enables the robot to move safely between locations within the map
• Full-body teleoperation capabilities enabling users to see through the robot’s eyes and directly control its full body movements
• Mechanisms to collect data samples, which can then be used by developers for training more advanced policies
• U.S.-based production, data handling, and support to accelerate development and maintain tight control over security

”Our technical strategy is to build the kind of robot that we, and the people we know, always wanted as a platform. We’re thinking about everyone across the broad robotics community we belong to—even the people with less robotics development backgrounds who didn’t know this could be an option for them,” explains CTO and co-founder, Josh Merel, former DeepMind research scientist. “We’re taking a pragmatic approach to make frontier robotics technology considerably more accessible. We have used every tool at our disposal to optimize for performance, cost, and safety.” 

Safety

Most existing humanoid platforms are unsafe around people. They tend to be heavy and rigid, use extremely powerful motors, and lack dynamic software limits on the forces they exert, making them difficult to control safely in close proximity to humans. As a result, developers are forced to bolt these robots to gantries or keep them behind cages, far from the people they’re meant to help.

Instead of being hoisted on a gantry, Sprout can sit on a chair; instead of being sequestered in caged-off workspaces, Sprout sits right next to you at a desk. Sprout is designed practically with safety features from the ground up to reduce risk in shared spaces, including:

• Lightweight, soft-bodied design with minimized pinch points, making it easy and comfortable to handle
• Compact 3.5-foot height with a low center of gravity to maximize safety while maintaining a wide range of motion
• Balanced motor torque with enough strength to be useful but not needlessly powerful 
• Compliant motor control allows users to reposition Sprout’s arms while it’s standing or walking and can even guide the robot by hand. Sprout naturally follows instead of pushing back. 

Combined with software-level limits on motor torques and time of flight safety sensors for obstacle avoidance, Sprout gives developers a platform they can confidently deploy in front of customers, families, and pets. 

[NYU Quote Placeholder: Having a smaller, safer, and easier-to-use robot is great for master’s students learning about robotics and for PhD students, for whom a bigger robot would be intimidating or potentially unsafe.]

‍Friendly

Most available robotics platforms lack functionality because they are not designed to interact with humans. Many ship without hands or grippers, can’t communicate with people, and favor industrial forms over approachable design.

If robots are going to operate everywhere humans do, their design needs feel natural, friendly, and easy for people to interact with. Fauna took the opposite approach from most available platforms by prioritizing people in every aspect of Sprout’s design:

• Sprout comes equipped with integrated grippers so it can be experimented and deployed for manipulation tasks
• It supports autonomous operation and responds to voice commands. Sprout can converse naturally, and with simple voice instructions, developers can direct the robot to perform tasks, navigate spaces, or trigger custom behaviors
• Sprout can express emotion through its articulated eyebrows, LED facial display, and body language
• Its design is complete with a colorful, endearing, ergonomic form factor that is naturally compatible with human environments

“There’s a fairly limited amount of scientific research on what makes a robot approachable, so we’ve supplemented with the decades of cultural data we do have access to,” says VP of Hardware, Anthony Moschella, former Peloton VP. “We studied the attributes of what separates pop culture’s beloved robots from their dystopian counterparts. Baymax, BB-8, Wall-E—they’re more abstract in design, and that works. If we are going to reach a future where robots are operating everywhere people do, then we need to make robots that people like. We haven’t seen our peers prioritize this aspect of robotics in the same way.”

To safely go where no robot has gone before

For robotics to progress into human spaces, it will take an ecosystem that enables more people to create, not fewer. By lowering the barrier to entry and fostering collaboration across hardware and software, Fauna is offering a practical entry point for developers to shape the next wave of human-robot interaction.

“Our mission is to build the safe and reliable robots people will actually want to have around one day, as indispensable in their lives as smartphones are today,” says CEO and co-founder, Rob Cochran. “Before robots ever make their way into the home, they have to make their way into developers’ hands. That’s what Fauna is accomplishing today.”

Developers interested in purchasing Sprout can fill out the product request form and learn more at faunarobotics.com.

‍About Fauna Robotics

Fauna Robotics is on a mission to build safe and reliable robots for everyone. Unlike the expensive, heavy, and intimidating industrial robots we know today, Fauna is deploying approachable, lightweight robots in human-centric spaces that are safe to be around anyone from adults to children to pets. Fauna makes its robots in America and works with some of the largest companies in the world to scale commercial applications in entertainment, retail, and home services. Combining deep product and research talent, the NYC-based team has been involved in multiple exits and several market‑defining hardware lines. Learn more at faunarobotics.com. 

Media Contact 

Carly Bourne

press@faunarobotics.com

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