Aldebaran Robotics To Open Source Nao Robot Control Software 26
mikejuk writes "According to an announcement at a robotics conference this week, Aldebaran Robotics is planning to make a significant portion of its code open source. The NAOqi embedded software is cross-platform and forms a distributed robotics framework. The Nao robot has come from a small start to become one of the standard tools of educational and research robotics and it is also a lot of fun. At the moment a Nao is still a little too expensive to be used as a recreational platform, but who knows? Currently it is claimed that there are over 1500 Nao robots being used in education and research."
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Wiki article in the summary says "Built-in OS Linux"
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...does it run Linux?
Are you a bot?
10 print "Does it run Linux?"
20 goto 10
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On Earth, too (Score:5, Funny)
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Share and Enjoy (Score:2)
Aldebaran Robotics? So I guess someone has already trademarked "Sirius Cybernetics Corporation"...
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well, it would make more sense to be Sol Cybernetics Corporation anyway
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india will house the complaints division.
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
To misread this as "Alderaan Robotics" in the title and think they they were destroyed along with millions of other voices? Good thing they're open-sourcing their control code. Hate to see that get destroyed too.
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One of the preprogrammed demos is it acting out the scene where C3PO was telling a story to the ewoks. So there's a star wars person there somewhere.
Open Source != Free Software (Score:2)
From TFA:
“We will release our software as OPEN SOURCE to allow researchers, teachers, and developers to adapt and extend our software according to their needs and knowledge."
Basically, this means they will give you the source code so that you can make it better for them. They will not give you all the software needed to create your own robotics platform (only releasing portions of the code). The software is touted as being "cross platform", but rest assured that the copyright license restrictions will prevent you from making use of "their code" to power a robotics system not purchased from them.
TL;DR: Pfffft. Let me know when it's released as Free Software.
Can't wait for their green whiskey! (Score:2)
More GPL'd software to run on your Nao (Score:3)
Shameless plug time!
I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League [www.tzi.de]. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites [bowdoin.edu] has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.
The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).
If you're interested, here's our public GitHub [github.com] and YouTube [youtube.com]
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They have to compete with Willow Garage (Score:2)
They're probably doing this to compete with Wilow Garage [willowgarage.com], which has their own open-source robot operating system.
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Great news. :-)
Maybe it will also help avoid the fate for an unemployed humanity Marshall Brain wrote about in the first part of "Manna" or I talk about in this youtube video:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com]
To avoid more economic disaster, we need to transition to a gift economy and other socioeconomic models before robots can replace most people in most tasks as they are more a
Alderaan (Score:1)