"Nao" from Aldebaran Robotics

A few days ago some of my colleagues and I took the chance to attend a guest lecture on campus about a robot designed in France due to be released within the next months. His name is Nao and he's intentionally designed to have Manga-Character-like looks.
The entire Computer that does the necessary computations is inside its replaceable head and runs a custom Linux on an AMD Geode processor with 2 Gigabytes of Flash memory and 256 Megabytes of RAM. It is fully controllable over WiFi, yet it only boasts 802.11b which we know only has a theoretical speed of 11 MBit/s. Hopefully they will at least get the G-Standard in there before the final release. It has two Cameras with standard VGA Resolution, one that looks straight ahead and one that looks down to the ground so the robot can identify objects directly in front of him.



To be honest I wasn't impressed too much by what this robot can do but what did impress me was how easy Aldebaran Robotics made it for the end-user slash programmer to work with this robot. You have drag-and-drop based editing of any movements or actions, like talking or listening (or remote controlling something with his Infared-enabled eyes), you want the robot to do and you can then export your work into C++ or Python code so you can work with it natively and refine it for example. I think this is going to be a successful product among the people of its target group, but the question is how large this target group can be at a starting price of 12.000 Euros for one unit.