“Will you be my friend, Buddy?”: When AI provides us with companion robots
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Buddy is as tall as three apples (a little over 50 cm) and rounded, equipped with six touch sensors, he moves on wheels. CAMY DUONG
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Series Will our homes soon be populated by machines capable of cleaning, educating our children, and keeping us company? Advances in artificial intelligence are ushering in a new era of robotics. An illustration of this is Blue Frog, which dreams of providing companion robots.
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His name is Buddy, the nickname young Anglo-Saxons give to their best friend. And this was certainly what Rodolphe Hasselvander had in mind when, in 2015, he created Blue Frog Robotics to market his little white robot. "From the start, Buddy was designed to create an empathetic bond with the user," explains the entrepreneur.
As tall as three apples (a little over 50 cm) and rounded, Buddy has no arms. Equipped with six touch sensors, it moves on wheels and has a head-screen with large, moving eyes like Manga heroes and an expressive mouth. Over the past ten years, the baby robot has come a long way: " Now that it has embedded generative artificial intelligence, Buddy truly becomes the physical embodiment of emotional intelligence…
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