Forget soulless humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus. This one’s more Wall-E

As the new robot called Sprout walks around a Manhattan office, nodding its rectangular head, lifting its windscreen-wiper-like “eyebrows” and offering to shake your hand with its grippers, it looks nothing like the sleek and intimidating humanoids built by companies like Tesla.

Sprout’s charm is the point. A five-year-old child could comfortably talk at eye level with this humanoid, which stands one metre (three feet) tall and wears a soft, padded exterior of sage-green foam.

Forged by stealth start-up Fauna Robotics over two years of secret research and development, Sprout aims to jump-start a whole new industry of building “approachable” robots for homes, schools and social spaces.

The robot is in many ways the first of its kind, at least in the United States, even as rapid advances in AI and robot engineering have finally made it possible to start building such machines.

If its emotive expressions and blinking lights seem vaguely familiar, it might be from generations of Star Wars droids and other endearingly clunky robotic sidekicks dreamed up in animation studios and children’s literature.

“Most people in this industry take inspiration from the science fiction that we grew up with,” says Fauna Robotics co-founder and chief executive Rob Cochran. “I think some do so from Westworld and Terminator. We do from Wall-E and Baymax and Rosie Jetson.”