SoftBank Robotics NAO

A 58 cm small humanoid from France's Aldebaran, a longtime staple of robotics education and RoboCup.

NAO is a small bipedal humanoid robot developed by France's Aldebaran Robotics, with the first version released in the late 2000s. SoftBank acquired Aldebaran in 2012–2013 and later renamed it SoftBank Robotics, which is why the robot is often called “SoftBank's NAO”; in 2022, the German company United Robotics Group bought the business and reverted the name to Aldebaran. The sixth generation, NAO V6 (2018), stands about 57 cm tall, weighs about 5.2 kg, has 25 degrees of freedom, and carries cameras, microphones, and touch sensors; it can be programmed with graphical tools or Python. For many years it has been the designated robot for RoboCup's Standard Platform League, and it's one of the most common teaching humanoids at universities and schools worldwide. Aldebaran reportedly entered insolvency administration in 2025, after which its assets were acquired by the Shenzhen company Maxvision (盛视科技).

ExampleIn RoboCup's Standard Platform League soccer matches, every team competes with the same NAO hardware, so only the software differs.

Also called

NAO

Related

Small-size Humanoid Robot · SoftBank Robotics Pepper · RoboCup · SoftBank Group · Research & Education Market · Human-Robot Interaction

Sources

Wikipedia: Nao (robot)
The Robot Report: Aldebaran, maker of Pepper and Nao robots, put in receivership

As of

2025-07