Robohub.org
 

NAO Next Gen now available for a wider audience


by
13 March 2014



share this:
NAO

As of yesterday, you can get the adorable and versatile humanoid robot NAO from Aldebaran Robotics for yourself, even if you are not an academic or a hardcore developer. According to Génération Robots, a European partner of Aldebaran Robotics, they are selling NAO Next Gen (that’s the fourth of the four versions of NAOs out there) with the starting price of 5628 €. In North America, the RobotsLab is offering NAO for $7990 – down from $16,000.

If you are a roboticist (especially an academic), you’ve surely come across NAO before at your colleagues’ labs, conferences, and exhibition booths. It’s a 25-DOF platform that has been a definite friend to researchers studying human-robot interaction (HRI).

NAO at HRI'14

To give you an idea, NAO was at the 9th ACE/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction last week and helped host the voting of the best video awards. On behalf of the chair of the video session, it sat on the podium and instructed the audience to clap and cheer on for the video submissions to be selected for the awards.

Apart from the fact that it has two HD cameras, four microphones, 2 hi-Fi speakers, and has been on TED more than once, this beloved robot comes with fun applications such as “NAO plays soccer”. Although I couldn’t tell you how well the application works, you can check it out for yourself from March 18th to 22nd if you’ll be attending Innorobo this year.

It’s still too pricey to be purchased as the next Christmas present for a child in your family. But it looks like that’s not what Aldebaran and  Génération intends to sell it for anyway. It’s definitely not too expensive as a platform to do HRI research on, use it to start your own robots-at-home or robots-for-entertainment business, or have it as your own personal robot because you’re just that kind of a person.

So, would you buy it? What would you use it for?

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 



tags: , , , , , , , , ,


AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference
AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference





Related posts :



Researchers are teaching robots to walk on Mars from the sand of New Mexico

  02 Sep 2025
Researchers are closer to equipping a dog-like robot to conduct science on the surface of Mars

Engineering fantasy into reality

  26 Aug 2025
PhD student Erik Ballesteros is building “Doc Ock” arms for future astronauts.

RoboCup@Work League: Interview with Christoph Steup

and   22 Aug 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup League focussed on industrial production systems.

Interview with Haimin Hu: Game-theoretic integration of safety, interaction and learning for human-centered autonomy

and   21 Aug 2025
Hear from Haimin in the latest in our series featuring the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

AIhub coffee corner: Agentic AI

  15 Aug 2025
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation.

Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

and   25 Jul 2025
Hear from PhD student Kate about her work on human-robot interactions.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2

  24 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the second half of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1

  21 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the opening days of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence