Blue Frog Robotics is the developer of BUDDY, the world’s first true Companion Robot that has captured the affection of tens of thousands of people around the world.
BUDDY is built on an open source platform and was conceived with the premise that it will become indispensable for all members of a household, much like today’s smartphone has become.
Blue Frog Robotics, headquartered in Paris, France and with offices in Boston and San Francisco, developed BUDDY to assist family members in their daily lives.
BUDDY can monitor a house, interact with home-connected devices, play learning games and childhood favorites like “Hide and Seek,” provide practical information to adults and support the elderly with medication reminders and companionship. BUDDY is also helping children with special needs, including autistic children.
Since BUDDY is built on a modular, flexible open source platform, the global community of BUDDY hardware and software developers are able to easily enrich the portfolio of applications specifically targeted to professionals in education and health care, as well as in other markets that are realizing the benefits of a companion robot.
After developing robots for nuclear, healthcare and defense applications within a robotics research laboratory (CRIIF), Blue Frog Robotics was founded; a cutting edge start-up which aims to transfer high robotics technologies to accessible consumer products. The company’s goal has been to make advanced robotic technologies and life-enhancing robots that are affordable and available to the mass market.
Rodolphe Hasselvander, co-founder of Blue Frog had always the dream to develop a robot accessible to everyone. Challenge achieved!
Already accepted by “early adopters” (on Indiegogo & adoptbuddy.com – 1,5 Million USD of pre-orders), BUDDY’s traction and potential has been validated.
The value proposition of BUDDY is to create or recreate social bonds and relations. BUDDY erases the technology’s complexity in favor of useful services that BUDDY will propose to the family. BUDDY becomes then a real digital friendly companion thanks to its vocal command, its body expression, especially through its facial expressions.
BUDDY can monitor a house, interact with home-connected devices, play learning games and childhood favorites like “Hide and Seek,” provide practical information to adults and support the elderly with medication reminders and companionship. BUDDY is also helping children with special needs, including autistic children.
BUDDY is a robot with multiple skills, and notably mobility and interaction through its speech interface, its soft and pure design, allowing all generations to seamlessly adopt him.
From the value proposition perspective, BUDDY will gather the following essential traits:
- Playing a role to connect the lonely/isolated person to its family, friends or other social relation
- Always standby, ready to interact with people by autonomous movement and through initiative and voice interaction (AI)
- Learning and data acquisition by being capable of adapted itself to its environment and then self-growing thanks to its sensors and data processing technology
- Intelligent moving platform based on an open operation system, adding apps to expand robot skills.
This will rely on the cloud service. Since BUDDY is built on a modular, flexible open source platform, the global community of BUDDY hardware and software developers are able to easily enrich the portfolio of applications specifically targeted to professionals in education and health care, as well as in other markets that are realizing the benefits of a companion robot.
Company Leadership
Rodolphe Hasselvander, Co-founder & CEO
Franck De Visme, Co-founder & COO
Maud Verraes, CMO
Jean Michel Mourier, CTO