Fauna Robotics, 2026
A humanoid that hosts strangers, live
In 2026 a six-engineer team turned Sprout into an autonomous host. It notices people across a room, holds a conversation with a character of its own, runs a show, and runs each visit from hello to goodbye by itself. I co-led the program. More than 100 visitors rated it 4.6 out of 5.
Sprout is Fauna Robotics' soft, 107 cm, 22.7 kg humanoid, launched in January 2026 for developers and researchers. See Sprout greet and gesture with people, on Fauna's site ↗
Arrive
Sprout notices you from across the room and waves. When you stop at its counter, it turns to you and says hello.
Talk
It talks with you through an LLM voice agent, in its own comic voice, and gestures as it speaks.
The photo
It turns 180° to stand with you for a photo, and you leave with a printed keepsake.
The show
It dances with lights in time and sings a song made for you.
Goodbye
It says goodbye on time and resets for the next visitor.
The conversation layer
The stage logic decides the moment (welcome, reveal, farewell and more); the LLM writes only the words, from a reviewed prompt library.
A comic character, tested like code
Contributed much of Sprout's comic persona, drawn from published research on robot stand-up, and tested it like code: the same agent with and without it, on friendly and skeptical visitors.
Model for words, code for actions
The model chooses the words; a deterministic stage layer guarantees every gesture and movement. Gestures went from about half the time to every time.
Visits that end well
Visits end on time-outs instead of noisy perception signals.
One system across several computers
ROS 2 across the robot and the stage, with one-command deploys from one commit, drift checks that fail loudly and visit logs joined across hosts.
The physical stage
Led 3 of the 6 workstreams, including hardware fabrication with an external vendor and the lab move; delivered on schedule.
Perception and the robot's motion were teammates' work; I integrated them.