In 2019, Seoul National University students Jeonghyun Yoon and Yoo-Jin Jo created a social robot that could provide emotional support and companionship for people living alone. They built the physical robot and software based on the Robot Operating System (ROS), a set of open source software frameworks for robotics development. Yoon and Jo developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine to analyze the moods and emotions of users when they spoke to the robot and worked to program the robot to react appropriately during specific interactions. “We became confident that software could have emotional value, and that tech could break down barriers for people living alone,” says Yoon, now the CEO of BlueSignum. “When we were working on creating robots, we realized they sometimes can do more than people.” Read more.