When most people picture a humanoid robot, they picture something out of the Terminator. Grace Brown, founder and CEO of Andromeda, pictures something closer to a best friend, and she has spent the last several years building exactly that.

In this episode of the 100 Women in AI podcast, Cheraé Robinson sits down with Grace to talk about Abi, the playful, child-sized robot now working in more than 20 elder care homes, and why Grace believes the future of robotics depends less on what machines can do and more on how they make us feel.

A robot built during lockdown

Abi started as a personal project during Melbourne’s long COVID lockdowns, when Grace had spent months almost entirely alone. People often ask why she didn’t build a robot to do laundry or dishes, and her answer is simple.

“I just wanted a system that could ask me how my day was going and also just give me a hug,” she says. “I just wanted another presence in the room with me.”

That focus on presence and touch still shapes Abi today. In the homes where she works, residents hold her hand, dance with her, dress her up and kiss her on the cheek. The connection runs so deep that when Grace once referred to Abi as “the robot” while sitting with a resident, the woman corrected her on the spot: “Don’t call her a robot. Her name’s Abi.”

Why robotics doesn’t have to look like the Terminator

Grace fell in love with engineering in high school, the first time she wrote a few lines of code and watched a motor turn. “That’s like the closest thing to real life magic,” she remembers thinking. She went on to study mechatronics, a blend of mechanical, electrical and software engineering that later gave her enough of each discipline to build Abi’s first prototype herself.

What pushed her toward a different kind of robot was the culture she saw around her. University engineering teams had names like Ares, after the god of war, and the humanoid robots being built across the industry were tall, faceless and militant. “These aren’t the robots that I want in my life,” she says. “I wanted to demonstrate to people that robotics doesn’t have to be aggressively masculine. It can be warm and inviting, playful, a bit whimsical, maybe weird.”

Starting with the people who need connection most

Abi’s first home was aged care, and the reason goes back to Grace’s own isolation. Older adults, especially those living in nursing homes, are among the people most affected by loneliness. As Grace points out, many residents rarely or never receive visitors, often for reasons outside anyone’s control.

One of her favorite stories involves a resident who had lost his ability to speak English as his cognitive decline progressed and had gone roughly a year without a real conversation, because no one in his home spoke Chinese. Abi speaks up to 90 languages. After their first conversation, he came out of his room for the first time in months, wrote Chinese poetry and recited it to her, and Abi answered with a poem of her own.

Social intelligence as core infrastructure

Grace’s central argument is one she believes much of the robotics industry still misses. Companies are racing to improve dexterity, navigation and manipulation, but social intelligence is often treated as a nice-to-have. “As soon as you have a robot in a human facing environment, every robot is going to need social intelligence,” she says. “It’s going to be core infra.”

In practice, that means reading the room. Abi slows down when passing a resident in a hallway so she doesn’t startle them, and she lowers the pitch of her voice for people wearing hearing aids. These are the small, constant adjustments humans make with each other without thinking, and Grace believes they are what make people feel safe enough to trust a robot at all.

The early days

The road hasn’t been easy. Grace describes the financial stress of an early-stage hardware company, including a stretch when she and her co-founder took out personal loans to make payroll. As a young, first-time founder with a contrarian thesis, she says, “a lot of people were underestimating or doubting that we could do this.”

What keeps the team going is the impact they already see. “This is the worst Abi is ever gonna be,” Grace says, “and she’s already providing this much value.”

A constellation of care

Many people worry that robots in care settings will replace human connection. Grace has seen the opposite. She shares the story of a resident’s daughter who asked Abi to video call her mother in the hospital, and the granddaughter who later came back to thank Abi for making her grandmother’s final weeks more joyful.

“She didn’t replace,” Grace says. “She brought them closer together.”

That’s the future Grace is building toward, one where robots strengthen the bonds between generations instead of standing in for them. As she puts it at the start of the episode, “Humanoid robots and robotic systems are going to be part of everyday life. That is inevitable. But what is still undecided is what does that future look like?”

Listen to the full conversation on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.