Blossom is a collaboration between Cornell University's Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab and Google Creative Technologies Singapore. It's a handcrafted social robot that is soft inside and out, built using traditional crafts like wool and wood, and is programmed with TensorFlow, Google's open-source machine learning framework. Guy Hoffman, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, says the research team wanted to bring warm materials to home robotics, instead of more plastics, glass and metal. Blossom is currently used in research at Cornell University through the study of new mechanical designs for social robots, and is also used as a platform to study how machine learning can make a robot react to video content. One of the aims is to help children on the autism spectrum to develop social skills.
