"The newest humanoid robot on the scene, Sprout, is not designed to carry boxes or stack shelves. Instead, this charming and relatively cheap model, roughly the size of a 9-year-old child, is meant to help customers in hotels, shops, and restaurants. "We said, 'What if we could build something lightweight, engaging, and safe to be around, and capable enough to do some exciting things?'" says Robert Cochran, cofounder and CEO of Fauna, the startup behind Sprout."
"Sprout's launch is part of a growing industry in the United States. The business of humanoids is booming despite the fact that it's still unclear how practical and useful these systems will be. More than a dozen US companies are working on humanoids, including Boston Dynamics, which recently signed a deal to use Google's AI in its robots; Tesla, which is developing a system called Optimus; and startups like Agility Robotics, Figure AI, and 1X."
Sprout is a compact humanoid robot about the size of a 9-year-old child, built to assist customers in hotels, shops, and restaurants rather than perform warehouse tasks. The robot is priced starting at $50,000 and is already being pitched as an in-room butler for hotels. Fauna positions Sprout as lightweight, engaging, and safe, and emphasizes ease of programming with software libraries for environment scanning, autonomous walking, and language model access. Sprout can be teleoperated out of the box to aid training and research. Early customers include Disney and Boston Dynamics. The humanoid industry in the United States is expanding rapidly, with many companies developing competing systems.
Read at WIRED
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