By now, you're probably familiar with the Nao humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics -- the robot that supplanted the Sony Aibo as the robot du jour for Robocup's Standard Platform League (international robot soccer competition) back in 2007 and retains that prestigious title yet. Recently, Aldebaran announced a new Educational Partnership Program that aims to expose students of higher education to the joys of programming advanced robots. Contemporaneously, Aldebaran announced a set of four product derivatives to match varied academic budgets, ranging from full humanoids, to upper-body manipulation rigs, and 2-DoF robot heads for audio-visual experimentation (see details below). Crucially, this new initiative provides a stable hardware platform with a comprehensive software suite (alternatively, extensive open-source ROS drivers) to match your educational, research, or just whimsical robot needs.
For those unfamiliar with the Aldebaran Nao, here is a fun video from the Shanghai Robotics Expo 2010 of twenty Nao humanoids performing a coordinated dance.
The new Aldebaran "Nao for Education" products announced as part of the Educational Partnership Program come with varying complexity / degrees-of-freedom (DoF), as shown below:
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Nao H21 and H25
21-DoF or 25-DoF fully-autonomous humanoid robot. |
Nao T14
14-DoF upper-body torso with prehensile manipulation capabilities. |
Nao T2
2-DoF bust for audio and visual interaction. |
The biggest benefit of using a commercial robot like the Nao is the hardware platforms' stability; it vastly simplifies the task of getting an advanced robot to do cool things with fewer hardware headaches -- factors that contribute to students' enthusiasm and satisfaction when learning about robotics. I have made this same statement regarding the Willow Garage PR2 robot -- stable commercial platforms transform many robotics challenges from hardware problems to software issues, where development cycles are measured in minutes rather than days.
The fact that Aldebaran offers a comprehensive software suite is yet another added benefit. Unfortunately, I am less familiar with their offering; however, as a major Robot Operating System (ROS) proponent, I am aware of some quality open-source ROS drivers, as explained / featured:
The first Nao driver for ROS was released by Brown University's RLAB in November of 2009. This initial release included head control, text-to-speech, basic navigation, and access to the forehead camera. Just a couple of days later, the University of Freiburg's Humanoid Robot Lab used Brown's Nao driver to develop new capabilities, including torso odometry and joystick-based teleoperation. Development didn't stop there: in December, the Humanoid Robot Lab put together a complete ROS stack for the Nao that added IMU state, a URDF robot model, visualization of the robot state in rviz, and more.
The Nao SDK already comes with built-in support for the open-source OpenCV library. It will be exciting to see what additional capabilities the Nao will gain now that it can be connected to the hundreds of different ROS packages that are freely available.
While the Nao is well-suited to beginner and intermediate roboticists, and despite being a rather young platform, it has already found utility as an advanced research platform. Here is just a small sampling of some research that has been performed to date, though much more is forthcoming:
- Generalized model learning for reinforcement learning on a humanoid robot (ICRA 2010)
- Mechatronic design of NAO humanoid (IROS 2009)
- An interactive tool for designing complex robot motion patterns (ICRA 2009)
- etc, etc, etc.
The Nao is probably best known for its role in Robocup, an international autonomous robot soccer competition. For example, check out the video below.
Often, it is the most whimsical implementations that are the most entertaining. For example, the twenty Nao humanoids dancing (top of article) or a group of six Nao humanoids playing Darumasan (Japanese red-light-green-light) with a PR2 (JSK's PR2 video contest entry):
In the spirit of full disclosure, we would like to acknowledge that Hizook was compensated (in part) for penning this article. We maintain the highest possible standards and only recommend products and initiatives to you that we (ourselves) would personally buy or recommend to close friends. We believe the Aldebaran Nao is a quality product, and have numerous friends and colleagues who attest likewise.
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