Fauna Sprout: A lightweight, approachable, developer-ready humanoid robot
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 hardware-software stack. An expressive head further enables social interaction -- a domain that remains underexplored on most utilitarian humanoids. By lowering physical and technical barriers to deployment, Sprout expands access to capable humanoid platforms and provides a practical basis for developing embodied intelligence in real human environments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.18963,
title = {Fauna Sprout: A lightweight, approachable, developer-ready humanoid robot},
author = {Fauna Robotics and : and Diego Aldarondo and Ana Pervan and Daniel Corbalan and Dave Petrillo and Bolun Dai and Aadhithya Iyer and Nina Mortensen and Erik Pearson and Sridhar Pandian Arunachalam and Emma Reznick and David Weis and Jacob Davison and Samuel Patterson and Tess Carella and Michael Suguitan and David Ye and Oswaldo Ferro and Nilesh Suriyarachchi and Spencer Ling and Erik Su and Daniel Giebisch and Peter Traver and Sam Fonseca and Mack Mor and Rohan Singh and Sertac Guven and Kangni Liu and Yaswanth Kumar Orru and Ashiq Rahman Anwar Batcha and Shruthi Ravindranath and Silky Arora and Hugo Ponte and Dez Hernandez and Utsav Chaudhary and Zack Walker and Michael Kelberman and Ivan Veloz and Christina Santa Lucia and Kat Casale and Helen Han and Michael Gromis and Michael Mignatti and Jason Reisman and Kelleher Guerin and Dario Narvaez and Christopher Anderson and Anthony Moschella and Robert Cochran and Josh Merel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.18963},
year = {2026}
}