New York-based startup Fauna Robotics has unveiled Sprout, a new kind of humanoid development platform designed to be safe, approachable, and emotionally engaging. Standing just 107 cm (42 in.) tall and weighing 22.7 kg (50 lb.), the robot features 29 degrees of freedom and is powered by an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin computer, aiming to move advanced robotics out of labs and into everyday human spaces.
In a field often dominated by hulking metal machines, Fauna Robotics is taking a radically different tack. Founded by Rob Cochran and Josh Merel, the company isn’t just building another robot; it’s crafting a character. Sprout’s mission is to create a data-driven “flywheel” for embodied AI by making a platform so accessible and safe that developers, educators, and even therapists can start building applications without a doctorate in robotics. But can a robot with articulated eyebrows and a playful design be a serious tool for advancing artificial intelligence? Fauna believes that’s exactly the point.
The core philosophy, explained by Rob Cochran in an interview with The Robot Report, is to skip the decades of fundamental research and give people the tools to create immediately. “It gives people the tools to start building interesting applications, rather than focusing on the kind of fundamentals that make it quite a small community of roboticists that are able to actually engage with robotics today,” Cochran said. He sees a parallel to the dawn of personal computing, where machines like the Apple II and the BASIC programming language created an abstraction layer that unleashed a wave of application developers. Sprout aims to be that same catalytic platform for physical AI.
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Central to this vision is Sprout’s deliberately friendly and safe design. Every aspect is engineered for positive interaction. Its compact size and lightweight frame are intentionally unintimidating, especially for children. Soft exterior panels and back-drivable motors minimize impact forces, while a dedicated safety subsystem monitors conditions in real-time. This isn’t a robot that needs to be caged; it’s built to share a space with people.
But what truly sets Sprout apart is its emphasis on emotional connection over pure utility. Featuring a “non-screen-based” face with motorized eyebrows and an LED array, Sprout communicates through physical expressions and gestures—like a thinking animation or a curious head tilt—reportedly making it more relatable. It can offer a high-five, shake hands, or pose playfully. “We’ve provided a software and developer experience packaged around this idea that you can do very low-level programming on this,” Cochran noted to The Robot Report. “But you also get mapping and navigation and voice interaction, and HRI [Human-Robot Interaction] features right out of the box.”
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This character-driven approach extends to its hardware. A four-microphone array enables sound localization, integrated speakers allow for verbal responses, and even its head features a grid for attaching LEGO bricks or other toys for customization. It’s a modular system with a swappable battery offering 3.5 hours of runtime, designed for durability and ease of use.
By blending an approachable aesthetic with serious computational power and stable APIs, Fauna Robotics hopes Sprout will become the go-to platform for domains like interactive education, assisted therapy, and social AI research. The goal is to generate the vast, real-world interaction data needed to train more capable and nuanced embodied AI. In the race toward general intelligence, Fauna is betting that the winning path isn’t through raw power alone, but through positive, widespread human contact.
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