Fauna Sprout: A lightweight, approachable, developer-ready humanoid robot
Fauna Robotics: Diego Aldarondo, Ana Pervan, Daniel Corbalan, Dave Petrillo, Bolun Dai, Aadhithya Iyer, Nina Mortensen, Erik Pearson, Sridhar Pandian Arunachalam, Emma Reznick, David Weis, Jacob Davison, Samuel Patterson, Tess Carella, Michael Suguitan, David Ye, Oswaldo Ferro

TL;DR
Sprout is a safe, expressive, and accessible humanoid robot platform designed for deployment in human environments, combining lightweight design, compliant control, and social interaction capabilities to advance practical embodied intelligence.
Contribution
Introduces Sprout, a lightweight, developer-friendly humanoid robot platform emphasizing safety, expressivity, and ease of deployment in human spaces.
Findings
Supports safe operation with compliant control and soft exteriors
Enables social interaction through an expressive head
Facilitates long-term deployment in human environments
Abstract
Recent advances in learned control, large-scale simulation, and generative models have accelerated progress toward general-purpose robotic controllers, yet the field still lacks platforms suitable for safe, expressive, long-term deployment in human environments. Most existing humanoids are either closed industrial systems or academic prototypes that are difficult to deploy and operate around people, limiting progress in robotics. We introduce Sprout, a developer platform designed to address these limitations through an emphasis on safety, expressivity, and developer accessibility. Sprout adopts a lightweight form factor with compliant control, limited joint torques, and soft exteriors to support safe operation in shared human spaces. The platform integrates whole-body control, manipulation with integrated grippers, and virtual-reality-based teleoperation within a unified…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Robot Interaction and HRI · Robotic Locomotion and Control · Robot Manipulation and Learning
