Out of the box, the Nao didn’t do anything interesting. The boot up time is about 3 minutes, after which the eyes flash, and the processor fan starts. Then nothing. With the robot off, we’ve been playing with some of the joints, and many of them are extremely stiff or choppy. It’s not clear at this point that this robot will actually be able to walk. According to Aldebaran, they will ship us 4 brand new robots in May.

Looking through the SDK documentation, the only way to compile a controller module to actually run on the Nao is going to be on Linux.

All in all, it’s been pretty disappointing. On the Aibo most of this stuff was pretty rock solid, even though OPEN-R was difficult interface to program. Tonight we will try to find out the Nao’s IP address and ssh into it, and see where we go from there.

The only progress we have made is in compiling one of the SDK examples, and having it bind with an instance of the Naoqi running on the mac.

On the upside, the docs show that we will have access to their motion engine, which is ZMP based, and whose parameters we can set.