US firm unveils small humanoid robot butler for household chores

Fauna, a New York-based robotics startup, has unveiled Sprout, a compact humanoid robot designed specifically for operation in everyday human environments such as homes, schools, offices, and service spaces. Unlike traditional industrial robots adapted for public use, Sprout is built from the ground up with safety, interaction, and accessibility as priorities. Standing 3.5 feet tall, it features a lightweight, soft exterior with quiet actuation and avoids sharp edges, enabling safe close physical proximity without safety cages. Its simple one-degree-of-freedom grippers support basic tasks like fetching objects and hand-offs, while the robot is engineered to fall, crawl, and recover without damage. Sprout also incorporates an expressive face to facilitate intuitive, nonverbal human-robot communication. Sprout is positioned as a developer-centric platform, offering whole-body behaviors such as walking, kneeling, crawling, compliant physical interaction, and fall recovery, alongside core capabilities like teleoperation, mapping, navigation, and expressive interaction primitives