Kangni Liu

Fauna Robotics, Diego Aldarondo, Ana Pervan et al.

Recent advances in learned control, large-scale simulation, and generative models have accelerated progress toward general-purpose robotic controllers, yet the field still lacks platforms suitable for safe, expressive, long-term deployment in human environments. Most existing humanoids are either closed industrial systems or academic prototypes that are difficult to deploy and operate around people, limiting progress in robotics. We introduce Sprout, a developer platform designed to address these limitations through an emphasis on safety, expressivity, and developer accessibility. Sprout adopts a lightweight form factor with compliant control, limited joint torques, and soft exteriors to support safe operation in shared human spaces. The platform integrates whole-body control, manipulation with integrated grippers, and virtual-reality-based teleoperation within a unified hardware-software stack. An expressive head further enables social interaction -- a domain that remains underexplored on most utilitarian humanoids. By lowering physical and technical barriers to deployment, Sprout expands access to capable humanoid platforms and provides a practical basis for developing embodied intelligence in real human environments.

Zhengyi Luo, Jiashun Wang, Kangni Liu et al.

We present SMPLOlympics, a collection of physically simulated environments that allow humanoids to compete in a variety of Olympic sports. Sports simulation offers a rich and standardized testing ground for evaluating and improving the capabilities of learning algorithms due to the diversity and physically demanding nature of athletic activities. As humans have been competing in these sports for many years, there is also a plethora of existing knowledge on the preferred strategy to achieve better performance. To leverage these existing human demonstrations from videos and motion capture, we design our humanoid to be compatible with the widely-used SMPL and SMPL-X human models from the vision and graphics community. We provide a suite of individual sports environments, including golf, javelin throw, high jump, long jump, and hurdling, as well as competitive sports, including both 1v1 and 2v2 games such as table tennis, tennis, fencing, boxing, soccer, and basketball. Our analysis shows that combining strong motion priors with simple rewards can result in human-like behavior in various sports. By providing a unified sports benchmark and baseline implementation of state and reward designs, we hope that SMPLOlympics can help the control and animation communities achieve human-like and performant behaviors.