Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot
Hi all — I'm Kel, VP of Platform at Fauna Robotics. We're coming out of stealth and shipping Sprout (Creator Edition) today: a developer-ready humanoid robot built to be safe, approachable, and capable. 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 +…
In plain words
Sprout is a lightweight humanoid robot from Fauna Robotics designed for developers to build applications rather than rebuild hardware. Standing 1.07 meters tall and weighing 22.7 kilograms, it features soft-bodied construction, compliant control, and active safety sensing. The Creator Edition comes with a fully featured SDK and core capabilities ready for human-robot interaction work. It targets developers and researchers seeking an approachable, safe robot platform for natural interaction applications.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi all — I'm Kel, VP of Platform at Fauna Robotics. We're coming out of stealth and shipping Sprout (Creator Edition) today: a developer-ready humanoid robot built to be safe, approachable, and capable. 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
More dev tools this month
the category →
Open-source GTM skills for technical founders
Dev tools · 29d ago · gtmcofounder.com
OpenTrailPaper is open-source bike computer firmware for the LilyGO T5S3 4.7" E-Paper PRO. It supports offline maps, GPX routes, FIT recording and Bluetooth sensors.
Dev tools · 1d ago · opentrailpaper.com
Launched alongside, January 2026
the whole month →- IN
Hey HN! I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code. Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped! I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity: http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
AI · Jan 2026 · cannoneyed.com
Automatic AI-powered code reviews the moment you open a PR
Dev tools · Jan 2026 · kilo.ai
