TL;DR Meta acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup co-founded by former Fauna Robotics co-founder Lerrel Pinto and former Nvidia researcher Xiaolong Wang, to bolster its humanoid robotics platform strategy. The deal, which brings whole-body robot control models and tactile sensor technology into Meta Superintelligence Labs, reveals Meta’s ambition to be the Android of humanoids: provide the intelligence layer and let others build the machines. Lerrel Pinto co-founded Fauna Robotics, a startup that built an approachable bipedal robot called Sprout. He left in 2025.  Amazon acquired Fauna in March , along with its 50 employees and its $50,000, three-and-a-half-foot-tall dancing humanoid, to enter the consumer robotics market. Pinto then co-founded Assured Robot Intelligence with Xiaolong Wang, a former Nvidia researcher and associate professor at UC San Diego who won the MLSys 2024 Best Paper Award for work on AI model optimisation.…