EP 72: Social Robotics 101: Building Robots That Understand You | Chris Kudla, Mind Children

Most robotics companies are chasing industrial automation. Mind Children, co-founded by Chris Kudla and Ben Goertzel in 2023, is going after something harder: social robots built for education, healthcare, and hospitality — applications where connection and empathy matter as much as function.

Topics covered:

• Why Mind Children bet on social robotics despite a harder-to-prove ROI than industrial robots
• Cody's modular operating system — and what changes when you swap a standard LLM for SingularityNET's memory-equipped, agentic systems
• The hide-and-seek demo: how Cody reasons in real time and recalls the game a week later
• The emotional intelligence roadmap — teaching Cody to recognize and respond to human distress
• Why Mind Children avoids streaming classroom or hospital video data, and their in-house data approach for regulated environments
• How Chris (product design) and Ben Goertzel (social robotics research) divide responsibilities
• Mind Children's next hardware iteration — designed to be safe enough for a child to hug
• Pilot plans: starting with museums, galleries, and event spaces before schools and healthcare
• How to follow Mind Children's progress and support their crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder

Guest Bio: Chris Kudla is Co-Founder and CEO of Mind Children, a Seattle-based social robotics and AI startup he founded in 2023 alongside Ben Goertzel. Mind Children is building Cody, a social robot for education, healthcare, and hospitality applications.

Connect: Find Mind Children on LinkedIn, at mindchildren.com, or support their campaign at wefunder.com/mindchildrenrobotics.