Show HN: Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot
faunarobotics.com
We set out to build Sprout because we believe robots belong around people. Too many humanoids still feel like heavy machinery that doesn't belong in human spaces, and even the “friendlier” ones force teams to spend their time rebuilding baseline hardware and software instead of real applications. Sprout is different: lightweight and soft-bodied (1.07m / 22.7kg), with compliant control + active safety sensing, and designed to feel more like the robots we trust in our imaginations, like Baymax or Wall-E—expressive, emotionally legible, and built for natural interaction and HRI work.
Sprout is a canvas for developers, with thoughtfully designed core capabilities and a fully featured SDK, so you can focus on what excites you. Out of the box, it can walk, kneel, crawl, and sit, map, localize, and navigate real environments, and supports full-body teleoperation and manipulation with integrated grippers and a stereo camera. We also provide simulation assets for Isaac Sim and MuJoCo, and include an MCP server so any of the robot’s functionality can be driven by the LLM or agent of your choice. You have everything you need to train your own manipulation policy, create a tour guide, build an emotive story-teller, and you can easily add your own modules to build whatever else you can imagine.
Sprout is already in use with groups across entertainment and research, including Disney, Boston Dynamics, UCSD, and New York University, and we would love to hear what you would build with Sprout!
Specs, videos, our platform paper, and a request form are up on our site: https://www.faunarobotics.com