SRAO will be a moderate-order natural-guide-star adaptive optics system which uses an innovative photon-counting wavefront sensor and EMCCD speckle-imaging camera to guide on faint stars with the 4.1m SOAR telescope. The system will produce diffraction-limited imaging in the NIR on targets as faint as m(V) = 16. In AO-assisted speckle imaging mode the system will attain the 30-mas visible diffraction limit on targets at least as faint as m(V) = 17. The system will be the first Southern hemisphere robotic adaptive optics system, with overheads an order of magnitude smaller than comparable systems. Using Robo-AO's proven robotic AO software, SRAO will be capable of observing overheads on sub-minute scales, allowing the observation of at least 200 targets per night. SRAO will attain three times the angular resolution of the Palomar Robo-AO system in the visible.