Aldebaran Robotic’s NAO Next Gen is a smarter personal robot, still cute

Aldebaran’s NAO robot was already pretty useable and likable, but the Next Gen version is smarter, more dextrous and could be used in the near future as an assistant to the elderly and children with mental disabilities.

For one thing, the Next Gen now has more computing power at its disposal and handles multitasking much better thanks to an on-board 1.6 GHz Atom processor. Also, NAO’s vision has received an upgrade with two HD cameras and the ability to process two video streams simultaneously. This improves face and object recognition even under changing lighting conditions. There is also a sonar distance sensor, two infrared emitters and receivers, nine tactile and eight pressure sensors. All in all, a pretty impressive set of tools that enable the robot to better navigate its environment.

NAO Next Gen has four microphones that allow it to pinpoint where a voice command, or any other noise for that matter, is coming from. New voice recognition software called Nuance coupled with a “word spotting” functionality allows the robot to recognize sentences or isolate a single word from a whole string of words in a sentence. Add a text to speech capability and fluency in 8 languages and NAO becomes an interesting partner for discussions.

And this is not the end of software related advancements. The new NAO now boasts a system to prevent limb/body collisions, an improved torque control mechanism and an adaptive walking algorithm. Should the 23 inch (59 cm) tall humanoid robot be pushed off balance, the fall will be automatically cushioned. Once a worrying shift in NAO’s center of mass is detected, all motion-related actions are instantly put on hold and the robot uses its limbs to protect itself against the impact, just like a human would.

NAO packs a 27,6-watt-hour battery that the company says provides the robot with 1.5 or more hours of autonomy, depending on usage.

Via