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

Created by the French firm ‘Aldebaran Robotics’ in 2008, and bought by ‘Softbank Robotics Japan’ in 2015, NAO is an autonomous and programmable humanoid robotic that has been efficiently utilized to analysis and improvement purposes for youngsters and adults. Greater than 13,000 NAO robots are utilized in greater than 70 nations around the globe. 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 Assessment’ revealed in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, we current an summary of the evolution of NAO’s technical capabilities. We additionally current the principle outcomes from a scoping assessment of the human-robot interplay analysis literature by which NAO was used.

Technical overview of Nao over time

Look-wise, NAO hasn’t aged a bit. The infantile anthropomorphic look of the robotic has stayed just about the identical over the past 10 years. Nevertheless, plenty of enchancment has been made over the past variations of the robots.

Evolution of the NAO robotic’s technical attribute since 2008

We additionally word that the software program surroundings for the robotic has additionally improved over time integrating new applied sciences and options as years handed: face recognition and monitoring, semantic engine. The NAOqi API additionally helps varied programming languages. In 2013, Aldebaran additionally created a developer group. This group platform allowed to share assets, behaviours and featured a discussion board. This has most likely participated so much within the growth 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 assessment

Geographical distribution of the papers included in our scoping assessment

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 nations all around the globe. And we see from the above map that the distribution is properly break up between North-America, Europe and Asia. However nonetheless, similar to in plenty of analysis subject the worldwide north, tends to publish greater than southern nations.

By way of the function of the robotic, researchers have investigated completely different software 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 software subject

As talked about above, NAO is provided with varied 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 an alternative made them depend on facial, and gesture recognition. We additionally famous in our evaluation that researchers usually used exterior units equivalent 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 pleasing was the looks of the robotic. NAO is definitely not simply an eye-catcher robotic as its portability is very appreciated by the researchers. NAO could be considered a plug-and-play robotic because of its sturdy 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 have been reported equivalent 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 might be used within the preliminary variations.

Nao’s communities

Through the years, a number of varieties of communities have fashioned across the NAO robotic platform.

1) Academic communities

In 2010, the College of Tokyo piloted a brand new academic program developed by Aldebaran Robotics that aimed to coach college students to make use of NAO. Together with some reductions to purchase NAO for academic 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 definitely 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 assessment, this led to fruitful development on technical capabilities of the robotic equivalent to its locomotion and imaginative and prescient system.

Extra just lately, the introduction of the Pepper robotic as a brand new platform for the robocup@Residence problem definitely can allow us to suppose that it’s going to enhance the robotic’s economical life and produce extra advances in social and at residence duties with the robotic.

3) Analysis communities

Aldebaran had a robust Analysis & Improvement technique in its early days and naturally grew to become accomplice of a number of massive European initiatives: ALIZ-E, DREAM, SQUIRREL, L2Tor. These methods had the benefit to kind the long run researchers in the usage of 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

Not too long ago a community of start-ups has woven across the NAO robotic. Offering varied providers equivalent to academic workshops, therapeutic periods, or enterprise and advertising providers, the variety of these start-ups have raised these previous few years (e.g. Interactive Robotics, RobotLAB and Avatarion).

Conclusion

In our assessment, we current a complete overview on the usage of NAO, which is a exceptional social robotic in lots of cases. Thus far, 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 vital duties. Nonetheless, there are gaps to be stuffed in view of sustainable and user-focused human-NAO interplay. We hope that our assessment can contribute to the sphere of HRI that wants extra reflection and normal proof on the usage of the social robots, equivalent to NAO in all kinds of contexts. An implication of the findings exhibits a larger want for growing the worth and sensible software 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 that may facilitate human-robot interplay.

tags: assessment