Grace Brown, co-founder and CEO of Andromeda Robotics, joins Dan Robbins on Tech Careers Hotline to discuss building Abby, a companion robot for aged care, and growing a robotics company.
Brown grew up enjoying maths, which her parents taught as puzzles and games. In high school, experimenting with Arduinos shifted her focus toward engineering and building things. She first made Abby as a student project, then saw an opportunity to bring the robot to aged care as COVID made loneliness more visible.
Abby is a roughly 110-centimeter-tall humanoid robot designed to interact with aged-care residents and help ease loneliness. She adapts to each person using memories of earlier conversations, whether they prefer travel, sport, politics, or dancing. A bubble-blowing hand gives Abby a playful personality and challenges familiar images of robots as threatening.
Brown says her role changes with the company’s needs, from preparing Abby for customers and handling contracts to making decisions across the business. Andromeda had about 76 employees and was moving into a larger Melbourne office, while Brown was based in San Francisco to lead expansion. She describes leadership as weighing trade-offs across teams, explaining decisions, and accepting that people may disagree.
Brown says fundraising in Australia can require substantial early customer traction, which helped Andromeda develop its product with customer input. The company had raised tens of millions, while many competitors had raised far more; she says Andromeda had more deployments than its competitors, as far as she knew. She looks for technically ambitious, curious people who share the goal of building robots with personality, and says the company deliberately works to recruit more women.
Asked whether Abby could displace human connection, Brown says the robot is intended to fill gaps where residents receive little social contact and staff lack time, not take away existing care. She says Andromeda is transparent that Abby is a robot, even as residents may form meaningful attachments to her. For young people, Brown recommends starting with the problems they want to solve and the skills they want to build; she also argues that technical literacy helps people use AI coding tools while catching their errors.
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Grace Brown, founder and CEO of Andromeda, discusses building Abby as a socially intelligent humanoid companion deployed in nursing homes in Australia and the United States.
Grace Brown, founder of Andromeda, and Maria Piechnik, co-founder of Wandelbots, discuss how robots are advancing, where they may help people, and what limits they still face with Ella Al-Shamahi on BBC World Service’s The Conversation.
Grace Brown, founder of Andromeda Robotics, and Manny Thu, chief commercial officer, discuss Abi’s development and potential roles in care with Dr. Louise Masara on NSW Health’s Future Health Podcast.
