Hello everyone,
We have just celebrated Nao's second birthday. Two years have gone by since the Al-05a prototype took its first steps, the forerunner of the robot that you know today. During these two years, our robot has evolved substantially and even travelled all over the world: the United States, South Korea, China, Europe… It was time for him to live his own life!
With this in view, he has left to conquer the world of research and education. We are now proud to announce the release of Nao Academics Edition.

As good news never comes alone, this year the RoboCup will bring 25 teams together compared to 15 in 2008. There will then be 100 Naos which will face each other on the Austrian football fields at the end of JUNE next year.
Happy reading and best wishes for 2009!

This year again, you showed your increasing interest in Nao. We thank you very sincerely. This project is today a reality due to the enthusiasm that drives us and the community's day-to-day support. The whole team is happy to wish you a happy Christmas and a 2009 full of success and enthusiasm!

Aldebaran Robotics is happy to propose Nao Academics Edition to laboratories and universities. This version of Nao was designed to be a genuine tool for professionals in robotics and researchers who are interested in man-machine interaction. Fitted with prehensile hands, capacitance probes, voice recognition functions, and, as standard, delivered with its Choregraphe graphic programming interface, this version corresponds fully to the various requirements of the academic world.

November was a particularly eventful month for Choregraphe, our graphic programming software dedicated to Nao. In fact, to prepare for the launch of the finalised version 1.0.0 of the software delivered with the Nao Academics Edition packs, the team organised a one-month beta test programme in which about 30 people participated, the majority of whom were recruited from among the members of the forum. The objectives of these beta testers with complementary profiles were to help us in detecting residual bugs in Choregraphe, to assess the points to be improved as well as to offer a preview of the possibility for creating behavioural elements for Nao.
Despite the fact that none of the beta testers had a Nao robot at their disposal (a 3D representation of Nao is included in Choregraphe), their work was meticulous and remarkable.
Furthermore, two competitions were organised to put the beta testers to the test in creating original behavioural elements for Nao: presenting the weather forecast and selecting newspaper articles from the RSS flows, everything without using speech synthesis. For these competitions, six beta testers (they will recognise themselves) stood out and succeeded in achieving the objectives set. One of them had the very good idea of using American sign language for Nao.
Choregraph-ers, we thank you very much for your help, and for having joined the club of contributors to Nao.

Weather forecast
Nao connects to a news RSS feed
Weather forecast with sign language

The Choregraphe adventure is only starting and obviously we will keep you informed of how it develops.

The RoboCup China Open was held in Zongshan from 5 to 7 December. The China Open is a competition similar to the RoboCup but open to all universities without any pre-selection. Organised by the Chinese University of Science and Technology, it brings together about 60 universities from all over the world. In the standard league, three teams have used Nao: the Wright Eagles comprising students from Carnegie Mellon and the Chinese University of Science and Technology, the Greek Kouretes from the University of Crete and the Australian Runswift from the University of New South Wales.

On the spot, great was the surprise! Nao became the competition mascot! In addition to being displayed on all the event's communication tools and signage, the visitors were welcomed by eight inflatable Naos 10 m high. We invite you to look at the incredible video of Nao in China. (Our thanks to Joseph Pinkasfeld, an engineer at Aldebaran Robotics)

Since the return from holidays in September, Aldebaran Robotics has attended a large number of conferences devoted to humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence all over the world. Nao is therefore seeing countries and is experiencing great success in the research world. For instance, in the Netherlands, at the end of October at the Belgian/Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference (BNAIC), our engineers ran a behavioural programming workshop which enabled the scientists present to become familiar with Choregraphe. Nao then went to Lyons for the ICT forum where he met Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner responsible for the information and media society. This event, which is held every two years, is one of the most important forums devoted to questions on research and public policies on Information and Communications Technology (ICT). This Networking platform particularly enabled a large number of manufacturers, researchers and institutions to discover Nao for the first time.

At the beginning of December, Nao was in Daejeon, in South Korea, for the "Humanoid 08", an event totally devoted to humanoid robotics, beside the large number of robots including the famous HUBO from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology. He then went to the SGAI, the 28th international conference on AI which was held in the theatre of Peterhouse College in Cambridge, where Nao was equal to the famous actors who tread these boards in the past. From conference to conference, he is acquiring a renown of which the whole world is becoming aware … and this is only the beginning!

Viviane Reding et Bruno Maisonnier à ICT