Nao (pronounced "na-oh") is an autonomous, programmable and medium-sized humanoid robot, developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics, a start-up headquartered in Paris. The Nao Academics Edition was first available for universities and laboratories for research and education purposes, and will not be available to the general public by 2011. On August 15, 2007, Nao replaced the robot dog Aibo by Sony as the robot used in the Robocup ("Robot Soccer World Cup") Standard Platform League (SPL), an international robotics competition. The Nao was used in RoboCup 2008 and 2009, and the NaoV3R was chosen as the platform for the SPL at RoboCup 2010.

We received our first of this model in January of 2004. This model was significantly different from the 210 range with the most obvious change being the shape of the robot. The ERS-7 is almost two inches longer and one inch higher and wider. The internals also underwent some changes. The processor is now running at 576MHz, and the cameras resolution increased by a factor of three *. A Wireless card is no longer an optional extra, but is built into these new robots.

New features on the ERS-7 included:

• Larger Body
• Stronger motors
• Two extra infra red sensors
• In-built wireless
• Faster CPU*
• Higher Resolution Camera*

* Unfortunately the camera resolution increase was proportionally larger than the CPU speed increase. This made the computational cost of processing each image higher than the gain in CPU power.

The ERS-210A series of Aibos were the latest in 2003 when MiPal began its involvement in the league. These robots came with 20 degrees of freedom, numerous touch sensors, camera, infra red sensors, stereo microphone and a speaker all powered by a 64-bit RISC processor running at 384MHz. A PCMIA slot and optional wireless card allowed the robots to be linked wirelessly.