Glad Birthday Nao! – Robohub

NAO robotic. Picture credit: Stephen Chin on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Created by the French firm ‘Aldebaran Robotics’ in 2008, and purchased by ‘Softbank Robotics Japan’ in 2015, NAO is an autonomous and programmable humanoid robotic that has been efficiently utilized to analysis and improvement functions for youngsters and adults. Greater than 13,000 NAO robots are utilized in greater than 70 international locations world wide. Just about each lab working in human-robot interplay analysis owns a NAO making it the social robotic that has been probably the most used within the historical past of the sphere.

In our paper ‘10 Years of Human-NAO Interplay Analysis: A Scoping Evaluate’ revealed in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, we current an summary of the evolution of NAO’s technical capabilities. We additionally current the primary outcomes from a scoping evaluation of the human-robot interplay analysis literature by which NAO was used.

Technical overview of Nao through the years

Look-wise, NAO hasn’t aged a bit. The infantile anthropomorphic look of the robotic has stayed just about the identical during the last 10 years. Nonetheless, a variety of enchancment has been made during the last variations of the robots.

Evolution of the NAO robotic’s technical attribute since 2008

We additionally be aware that the software program surroundings for the robotic has additionally improved through the years integrating new applied sciences and options as years handed: face recognition and monitoring, semantic engine. The NAOqi API additionally helps numerous programming languages. In 2013, Aldebaran additionally created a developer neighborhood. This neighborhood platform allowed to share sources, behaviours and featured a discussion board. This has in all probability participated quite a bit within the enlargement and adoption of robotic with builders and researcher sharing designs of behaviours, and different video games they developed with the robotic.

Quantitative evaluation of the scoping evaluation

Geographical distribution of the papers included in our scoping evaluation

The geographical distribution of authors utilizing NAO for his or her analysis in HRI is unprecedented for a social robotic. NAO has been utilized in greater than 50 international locations all world wide. And we see from the above map that the distribution is properly break up between North-America, Europe and Asia. However nonetheless, identical to in a variety of analysis discipline the worldwide north, tends to publish greater than southern international locations.

By way of the position of the robotic, researchers have investigated completely different utility area with the robotic getting used as a peer or a demonstrator in public areas, an academic and assistant for therapists (for youngsters with ASD, studying incapacity or listening to incapacity) being the dominant ones.

Enter knowledge (left), output knowledge (center), gear (proper) for every utility discipline

As talked about above, NAO is supplied with numerous sensors and actuators permitting for multi-modal interplay. Typically researchers have used the robotic to talk and/or make gestures. On the notion facet, the robotic’s restricted speech recognition and poor microphone high quality refrained researcher to make use of NLP however as a substitute made them depend on facial, and gesture recognition. We additionally famous in our evaluation that researchers usually used exterior units similar to RGBD cameras or tablets in an effort to seize different alerts permitting to evaluate the state of affairs.

Qualitative outcomes

A number of research reported how enjoyable and pleasurable was the looks of the robotic. NAO is actually not simply an eye-catcher robotic as its portability is very appreciated by the researchers. NAO might be thought to be a plug-and-play robotic resulting from its strong and simple setup traits. It has additionally been discovered inexpensive in comparison with different humanoid robots.

On the opposite facet, a number of technical points had been reported similar to low battery life and overheating points. The speech recognition limits the interplay distance and context (i.e. noisy environments). Lastly, not a lot embedded autonomous performance may very well be used within the preliminary variations.

Nao’s communities

Over time, a number of kinds of communities have fashioned across the NAO robotic platform.

1) Instructional communities

In 2010, the College of Tokyo piloted a brand new instructional program developed by Aldebaran Robotics that aimed to coach college students to make use of NAO. Together with some reductions to purchase NAO for instructional functions, the corporate launched some ebooks. The books and academic program cowl each technical facets of utilizing the robotic in addition to extra artistic initiatives that may be given as train to college students. The tutorial market actually helped in making NAO extensively used within the 2010’s.

2) Engineering communities

In 2007, the Robocup determined to make use of the NAO robotic because the official platform for its soccer league. As detailed in the evaluation, this led to fruitful development on technical capabilities of the robotic similar to its locomotion and imaginative and prescient system.

Extra not too long ago, the introduction of the Pepper robotic as a brand new platform for the robocup@Residence problem actually can allow us to assume that it’s going to increase the robotic’s economical life and produce extra advances in social and at dwelling duties with the robotic.

3) Analysis communities

Aldebaran had a robust Analysis & Growth technique in its early days and naturally grew to become companion of a number of giant European initiatives: ALIZ-E, DREAM, SQUIRREL, L2Tor. These methods had the benefit to type the longer term researchers in using their platform and made NAO a dominant robotic in human-robot interplay analysis between 2015 and 2019.

4) Industrial translation

Picture from RobotLab web site visited on December twentieth 2021

Lately a community of start-ups has woven across the NAO robotic. Offering numerous providers similar to instructional workshops, therapeutic classes, or enterprise and advertising and marketing providers, the variety of these start-ups have raised these previous few years (e.g. Interactive Robotics, RobotLAB and Avatarion).

Conclusion

In our evaluation, we current a complete overview on using NAO, which is a outstanding social robotic in lots of situations. To date, NAO has been uncovered to a difficult but rewarding journey. Its social roles have expanded because of its likeable look and multi-modal capabilities adopted by its health to ship socially necessary duties. Nonetheless, there are gaps to be stuffed in view of sustainable and user-focused human-NAO interplay. We hope that our evaluation can contribute to the sphere of HRI that wants extra reflection and common proof on using the social robots, similar to NAO in all kinds of contexts. An implication of the findings exhibits a higher want for growing the worth and sensible utility of NAO in user-centered research. Future research ought to think about the significance of real-world and unrestricted experiments with NAO and contain different people which may facilitate human-robot interplay.

tags: evaluation