Fauna Sprout: A lightweight, approachable, developer-ready humanoid robot

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.

HITgram: A Platform for Experimenting with n-gram Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful but resource intensive, limiting accessibility. HITgram addresses this gap by offering a lightweight platform for n-gram model experimentation, ideal for resource-constrained environments. It supports unigrams to 4-grams and incorporates features like context sensitive weighting, Laplace smoothing, and dynamic corpus management to e-hance prediction accuracy, even for unseen word sequences. Experiments demonstrate HITgram's efficiency, achieving 50,000 tokens/second and generating 2-grams from a 320MB corpus in 62 seconds. HITgram scales efficiently, constructing 4-grams from a 1GB file in under 298 seconds on an 8 GB RAM system. Planned enhancements include multilingual support, advanced smoothing, parallel processing, and model saving, further broadening its utility.