Show HN: Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot(faunarobotics.com)
faunarobotics.com
Show HN: Sprout, a fun-sized, developer-ready humanoid robot
https://faunarobotics.com
3 comments
Awesome, congrats on the launch! Can you say more about the software stack? Is it open-source? I see you are using ROS on the robot, but what about the full-stack (robot + cloud + web)? Did you build all that yourself? At Transitive Robotics we are developing the Transitive open-source framework for full-stack robotics (complementing ROS, not replacing it). On top of Transitive it is easy to build capabilities and we already offer many such modules, e.g., for webrtc video-streaming, teleop, mission dispatch, etc. This means you don't need to build all that yourself and once Transitive is installed on a robot, your end-users can install more capabilities now or in the future. Do you think this could be of interest to your users?
https://transitiverobotics.com/docs/learn/intro/
https://transitiverobotics.com/docs/learn/intro/
Congrats on the launch. Hope you get a moment to answer the questions here.
Speaking of which, where can we preview the SDK and documentation? The site is a little light on development details.
Speaking of which, where can we preview the SDK and documentation? The site is a little light on development details.
Super cool! How much is Sprout?
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