The Rundown AI / Articles / Robotics / Amazon now has a kid-sized humanoid

Robotics

Amazon now has a kid-sized humanoid

PLUS: Zoox heads to Austin and Miami

Jennifer Mossalgue

March 26, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Amazon just acquired New York startup Fauna Robotics — and its pint-sized humanoid Sprout, a 3.5-foot bot that walks, crawls, jumps, and makes eyes at you with animated LED pupils.

It’s Amazon’s second robotics buy this month, after stair-climbing delivery bot Rivr. Where it goes from warehouse to living room, that part’s still wide open.

In today’s robotics rundown:

Amazon buys NYC-based humanoid startup
Zoox robotaxis roll into Austin and Miami
A wristband that can control robots
New 911 drone aims to replace police choppers
Quick hits on other robotic news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

🤖 Amazon buys NYC-based humanoid startup

Image source: Fauna Robotics / Reve

The Rundown: Amazon just snapped up New York-based Fauna Robotics this week, adding a pint-sized, developer-friendly humanoid to a robotics portfolio that’s now expanding well beyond the warehouse.

The details:

The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, brings Fauna’s roughly 50 employees, including its two founders, into Amazon in New York City.
Sprout stands 3.5 feet tall, weighs 50 pounds, and walks, crawls, jumps, dances, grips objects, and emotes with LED eyes and motorized eyebrows.
The $50K robot runs on a 64GB Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin and ships with a developer platform that lets researchers build apps via modular AI architecture.
It’s Amazon’s second robotics buy this month, following its acquisition of Zurich-based Rivr, the startup behind a stair-climbing delivery bot.

Why it matters: Amazon has tried to crack the home robot market twice now — Astro went nowhere, and iRobot got blocked by regulators. Sprout is a different approach: rather than starting with a mass-market product, Amazon is buying a full-stack humanoid dev platform to seed an ecosystem first and decide on the use case later.

TOGETHER WITH ROBOFLOW

🔥 Roboflow Vision for Robotics

The Rundown: Roboflow’s vision AI platform helps robotic teams build systems that handle unstructured tasks, navigate diverse terrain, and collaborate with humans, from data pipeline to production deployment faster.

With Roboflow, you can:

Navigate dynamic environments with full situational awareness
Handle irregular objects and mixed inventory without rebuilding pipelines
Deploy edge or cloud inference to your entire robot fleet

Learn More.

ZOOX

🚖 Zoox’s robotaxis roll into Austin and Miami

Image source: Zoox

The Rundown: Amazon-owned Zoox is deploying its steering‑wheel‑less robotaxis for testing on public roads in Austin and Miami this year, a key step toward launching commercial ride‑hailing beyond Las Vegas and San Francisco.

The details:

Initial rides in both cities will be limited to Zoox employees and their friends and families before opening to early public riders through an “Explorer” program.
Zoox is also massively expanding its service areas in San Francisco and Las Vegas, including dense neighborhoods and major entertainment venues.
The company says its robotaxis have already logged nearly 2M autonomous miles and carried more than 350K riders.
Zoox has inked a multiyear deal to put its robotaxis on the Uber app in Las Vegas starting this summer, with Los Angeles set to follow in 2027.

Why it matters: Zoox is pushing into Waymo’s territory, even though it still needs NHTSA safety exemptions before it can charge fares. Waymo is operating robotaxis in 10 cities nationwide, while Tesla’s long-promised robotaxi service remains nascent, narrowing the competitive field as Zoox pushes toward paid rides in 2026.

MIT

👉🏽 A wristband that can control robots

Image source: MIT / Melanie Gonick

The Rundown: MIT engineers just built a chunky wristband that transforms the tendons and muscles in your wrist into a real-time control interface for robots and virtual worlds — no cameras, no wired gloves, no physical controllers required.

The details:

The band fires grayscale ultrasound at tendons in your wrist, then feeds that data to an AI model that translates motion patterns into control signals.
Trained on synchronized ultrasound and motion-capture data, the system lets users puppeteer a robotic hand to manipulate virtual objects and play piano.
In tests with eight users performing 26 ASL letters and everyday grasps (like scissors and tennis balls), it reconstructed hand poses in real time.
Lead author Xuanhe Zhao envisions a miniaturized, general-purpose band that streams rich hand data to train robots and gives AR/VR more intuitive control.

Why it matters: This wristband points to a future where human dexterity becomes a universal interface: your hand movements streamed directly to robots, AR headsets, and whatever comes after the smartphone (Meta’s also doing something similar with its Ray-Bans). Simply put, a new, more intuitive kind of control is coming our way.

BRINC

🚁 New 911 drone aims to replace police choppers

Image source: BRINC

The Rundown: Backed by Sam Altman and the U.S.’s anti-DJI mood, former Thiel fellow Blake Resnick’s startup BRINC has unveiled Guardian, a Starlink-linked drone it claims can replace police helicopters with 60 mph flights and robotic battery swaps.

The details:

Guardian is designed to be deployed from rooftop “nests,” autonomously swapping batteries so it can stay in operation and launch quickly on 911 calls.
The drone links to Starlink for long-range, low-latency connectivity and streams video and data to command centers even in dead zones.
Its 60 mph top speed, heavy payload capacity, and sensor suite are pitched as delivering helicopter-like capabilities in search and rescue and suspect pursuit.
The launch comes as U.S. lawmakers seek to sideline Chinese-made DJI drones, creating an opening for domestic suppliers like BRINC.

Why it matters: Guardian arrives at a pivotal moment. U.S. lawmakers have spent the past year pushing to ground DJI drones over national security concerns, leaving a gaping hole in the domestic public safety market. BRINC is positioning itself to fill it — with a Starlink-tethered aircraft that promises to be cheaper and faster than helicopters.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

OpenAI is shutting down its Sora AI video app and API to redirect compute and research toward using Sora’s world‑simulation tech to train robots.

Melania Trump opened the White House’s Fostering the Future Together summit by striding into the East Room with a Figure 3 humanoid.

A self-driving food delivery robot crashed into a Chicago bus shelter, for the second time this week — this one being a Coco Robotics unit in Old Town.

Munich-based Agile Robots struck a long-term deal to integrate Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics models into its industrial robots.

Hyundai and Persona AI are building a humanoid welding robot for shipyards, with a prototype due in late 2026 and commercial deployment targeted for 2027.

MIT and Symbotic built an AI system that uses deep reinforcement learning plus fast planning algorithms to choreograph hundreds of warehouse robots in real time.

McDonald’s is piloting Keenon Robotics’ humanoids at a Shanghai restaurant to greet customers, deliver food, and test customer-facing automation’s impact on service.

China’s Westlake Robotics unveiled Titan 01, a humanoid powered by its in‑house General Action Expert AI model that can mirror human movements in real time.

Rimac spinout Verne is teaming up with Uber and Pony.ai to launch a robotaxi service in Zagreb, putting the little-known Croatian startup on the map.

San José International Airport launched a four‑month pilot of “José,” an AI-powered humanoid from local startup IntBot that greets travelers at Terminal B.

Lucid Bots, a Charlotte-based startup that builds industrial cleaning drones and ground robots for window washing, raised $20M in a Series B round of funding.

Researchers built a silkworm-moth–inspired robot that can track odor sources indoors and outdoors almost as well, even after one of its two smell sensors fails.

COMMUNITY