Blossom is a robot that is soft inside and out. It is built using traditional crafts like wool and wood. We wanted to bring back warm materials to home robotics, instead of more plastics, glass, and metal. You can customize Blossom by knitting new exteriors and attaching different crafted parts to make each robot unique.

Blossom is a collaboration between Cornell University’s Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab and Google Creative Technologies Singapore.

Collaborators: Michael Suguitan, Greg Holman, James Redd, Ankita Chandak, Michael Hu, Emma Cohn, Miranda Jeffries, Antoine Klopocki (Cornell); Miguel de Andrés Clavera, Rosa Uchima, Gene Brutty, Alex Chia, and Mandy Vu (Google).

Blossom is currently used in research at Cornell University. We study new mechanical designs for social robots, including how to use soft materials and soft mechanisms in social robot design.

This robot is also used as a platform to study how Machine Learning can be used to make a robot react to YouTube content. One of the aims is to help children on the Autism spectrum to develop social skills. Blossom is built using TensorFlow, Google’s open-source Machine Learning framework.