The NAO humanoid: a combination of performance and affordability

TLDR

The NAO robot is lightweight and compact, standing 0.57 m tall and weighing about 4.5 kg. The authors aim to design an affordable autonomous humanoid robot that does not compromise on quality or performance. The NAO robot features a pelvis‑centric kinematic design, brush‑DC motor actuation, distributed software architecture, and modular head and forearms, enabling easy software updates and customization. Its comprehensive, functional design led to its selection to replace AIBO quadrupeds in the 2008 RoboCup standard league, demonstrating its affordability and performance.

Abstract

This article presents the design of the autonomous humanoid robot called NAO that is built by the French company Aldebaran-Robotics. With its height of 0.57 m and its weight about 4.5 kg, this innovative robot is lightweight and compact. It distinguishes itself from its existing Japanese, American, and other counterparts thanks to its pelvis kinematics design, its proprietary actuation system based on brush DC motors, its electronic, computer and distributed software architectures. This robot has been designed to be affordable without sacrificing quality and performance. It is an open and easy-to-handle platform where the user can change all the embedded system software or just add some applications to make the robot adopt specific behaviours. The robot's head and forearms are modular and can be changed to promote further evolution. The comprehensive and functional design is one of the reasons that helped select NAO to replace the AIBO quadrupeds in the 2008 RoboCup standard league.